The Daily Wire Backstage: 2019 Predictions Special
What insanity can we look forward to in 2019? Will there be a wall? Will ISIS take over in Syria? Will millennials succeed in ridding the world of "Friends" and "Seinfeld" reruns?
Join this roundtable discussion featuring Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and Daily Wire god-king Jeremy Boreing, as they discuss the wins and losses of 2018 and what to be ready for in the coming year.
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You're about to listen to our latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, where I join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the man who will one day fire me for real, Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, for a great conversation on politics and culture, and where we answer questions from Daily Wire subscribers.
Without further ado, here is Backstage.
Fake laugh in three, two, one, five!
Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage 2019 Prediction Special, where we will tell you with absolute certainty what will happen this year, starting with me exercising my well-known gift for clairvoyance, a prediction that I have not yet voiced anywhere else.
You will have heard it first right here.
Prediction 2019, Elizabeth Warren will seek the Democratic nomination for president.
That's amazing.
No way.
Uncanny.
Am I right?
Uncanny.
Am I right?
I don't buy it.
Smoke them, peace pipe.
What do you think your chances of winning are?
- Well, if I had to guess, I think I'd say it's about 1:20 a month.
- Yeah! - I'm sorry, I was reading the president's Twitter feed tonight.
So I just, it's funny.
- We're allowed to laugh at it, right? - I don't know.
- Yeah, we're allowed to laugh.
I was told I was not allowed to laugh at it.
It's very not funny.
Just so people know, the president tweeted our meme.
What's not funny about that?
That's right.
But it's not funny because it degrades conservatism to have a president who tweets this sort of stuff.
My favorite thing that happens on Twitter now, by the way, the best thing of 2018.
You heard that Donald Trump was president, right?
This is my point.
Somebody said to me today, they were like, okay, so if Obama had done this, you would have been so angry.
Trump did it and you're laughing at it.
It's like, right, because they're two different humans.
I have a four-year-old daughter and I have a two-year-old son.
And my two-year-old son sits on my shoulders and then hits me on the head.
And I get mildly angry.
If it were my four-year-old daughter, I'd get a lot more angry.
They're very, very different human beings.
If President Obama, who aspired to be Nelson Mandela, were tweeting out this sort of stuff in fully hypocritical fashion, I'd be a lot more angry than Donald Trump, who aspires to be in the WWE Hall of Fame...
And he's actually achieved his life goal already.
He's in the WWE Hall of Fame.
Whereas Obama was never Nelson Mandela and did say this kind of stuff on a quasi-regular basis.
Absolutely.
We're allowed to laugh.
Come on, if you can't laugh at this stuff.
And the president is tweeting our memes.
It's so funny.
The whole thing is so funny.
My favorite thing, though, on Twitter now is that no one will let you make a joke about anything.
Yes.
And one of the things that they always say is, was that some sort of attempt at a joke?
There are no attempts at jokes.
It may not have been a very good joke, but I fully made it.
We're living in a quiet place.
I said this on the show.
We have to keep your voice down, because otherwise they come and get you.
It's hairy to pieces, you know?
Yeah, the only way to survive is it.
Is it Bird Box or is it a quiet place?
I think Bird Box is a quiet place with blindfolds or something like that.
Yeah, exactly.
And now, do you know this?
They have the Bird Box Challenge where they're telling people to send out videos of themselves blindfold, doing ordinary tasks blindfold, and people are getting hurt.
What?
It's like Darwin.
Can we tell everybody to walk into traffic?
It's like Darwin is still operational.
You can't do that on Twitter.
And it's threatening self-harm.
That's right.
Self-harm or the harm of others, which we learned a lot about today also.
We'll get to that.
But first, I'm going to continue with these scripted introductions.
I am Jeremy Boring, known around these parts as the God King, lowercase g, lowercase k.
By the way, it's always important to Drew that I point out, it's God King of the Daily Watch.
I'm not a general God King.
Not of Egypt or China.
I have no actual power.
Also joining me today, as per usual, these three muckety-mucks right here.
Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, hosts of the Ben Shapiro Show, Andrew Klavan Show, and Michael Knowles Show, respectively.
Did I say that right?
I think I said that right.
And yet, only one of these fellas has had the honor of being Twitter banned because of Brussels sprouts.
That's right, Brussels sprouts.
And I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
As always, we're graced by the lovely and talented Elisha Krause, who not only brings the sole semblance of professionalism to the show, she also brings your burning questions to us.
Hot off the internet, Elisha.
In defense of Brussels sprouts that are delicious with honey embroiled.
Can we cut her, mate?
If I get fired over that and Michael hasn't been fired over, oh, I don't know, all the Michael things, I won't revolt.
Hey guys, it's going to be a fun night.
And for everyone watching at home, if you want to send us those really interesting questions that you have, just type them in in the chat box on the Daily Wire live stream over at dailywire.com.
And remember, only subscribers get to ask those questions.
So if you're not a subscriber, first of all, why not?
Did somebody in your life not love you and didn't get you a subscription for Christmas?
How dare they?
But if you're not a subscriber and you're like, hey, I want to get myself a belated Christmas gift, head on over to dailywire.com, click on the red subscribe button at the top of the page to become a subscriber tonight, and then get all those questions in, and I'll be tossing them to the guys.
Alicia, thank you.
And as I continue down the path of smoking this delicious Rocky Patel, who, by the way, sent us like an ashtray and some delicious cigars, and this actual lightsaber.
I'm going to go after Darth Vader with this thing.
Yeah.
Great.
Very kind of them.
We are suckers for free cigars around here.
We will not do a free ad for anything.
Literally, I've had family members who write to me, and they're like, Jeremy, you know.
The rent's due.
Oh, Uncle Tom needs this.
You send us a cigar.
Oh, yeah.
Anything.
I'll wear your...
I'll tattoo your name on my face.
I don't care.
So we're going to be talking, doing something we haven't done before.
Typically the show is not especially political.
We get into the deeper things, the finer things, the philosophical.
But we are going to do a rundown of the news.
This is because the only one of us with an actually successful podcast suggested.
That what people want to hear about from these political pundits is politics.
We're going to test it with like 15 minutes on politics.
But first, we're going to talk about Policy Genius, who makes it possible for us to...
I actually don't want to blame them for what they make it possible.
It's not their fault.
It's not their wonderful service.
This is exactly right.
So policy genius.
I've been thinking a lot about death these days.
One of the reasons for that is because I am deathly sick and also because I want to die having to be here an extra two hours today with these gentlemen.
But thinking about death makes me think, you know, perhaps I should have life insurance.
And fortunately for me, I do, because I'm a foresighted, rational human being.
But you should also be a foresighted, rational human being.
You should also have some life insurance.
And that's where Policy Genius comes in.
Getting life insurance is one of the more intimidating parts of becoming a full-fledged adult.
So if you're into adulting or other misuse of nouns as verbs, then perhaps you should go check out Policy Genius right now.
They have a website that makes it easy for you to compare quotes, get advice, and get covered without extra fees or commissioned sales agents.
You can apply online.
The Policy Genius Advisors handle all the red tape.
They negotiate your rate with the insurance company.
In minutes, you can compare quotes from all the top insurers and find the coverage that you need at a price you can afford, all part of their best price guarantee.
They don't just do life insurance.
They also do disability insurance, homeowners insurance, auto insurance.
They help you with all these things.
If you've been intimidated or frustrated by insurance in the past, if you're like Drew and you're close to death and you're just looking for another possible life insurance policy...
It's a pre-existing condition with me.
Then go check out PolicyGenius.com right now.
Again, in minutes you can compare quotes and apply.
You can do the whole thing on your phone right this very instant.
PolicyGenius, the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
Go check out PolicyGenius right now.
And again, I'm grateful that I already have PolicyGenius so that if I commit suicide halfway through today's show...
And presumably I'll have some sort of coverage.
There can be no suicide jokes.
We're not allowed to make suicide jokes.
So it is true that today I was banned by Twitter for 12 hours, although it wound up being for about 45 minutes.
This was for the best reason.
Yeah, I was banned because Daily Wire's senior editor, Emily Zanotti, made the biggest fake news tweet of 2018, coming in right down to the wire on the 31st.
She said that the best recipe for Brussels sprouts, if maybe you grew up not liking to eat vegetables, the best recipe for Brussels sprouts is something with olive oil and honey.
They're disgusting.
I retorted that an even better recipe for Brussels sprouts, a little salt, a little pepper, a dash of paprika, then you do a splash of Worcestershire sauce, you brown a little bacon in a cast iron skillet, then you throw it all away and sear your face off.
Because that would be better than eating Brussels sprouts.
That's better to me.
I wake up this morning with an alert from Twitter saying, I'm not kidding, that there are people in this world who care about me and that I am not alone.
And a link to a suicide hotline because...
Because they had determined that I was a danger to myself and was advocating people harm themselves over this tweet.
I've always felt you were a danger to others, but I've never felt you were a danger to yourself.
Absolutely to others.
Are you kidding me?
Have you ever seen me in a kitchen?
Fortunately, I have a friend even more famous, successful than myself, Ben Shapiro, who was able to intercede on my behalf.
And the lords of Twitter decided that, in retrospect, my joke about not eating leafy green vegetables was, in fact, a joke about not eating leafy green vegetables.
And not an actual encouragement of suicide.
It's funny, but it's not...
I mean, you're funny.
Your part is funny.
But this is not funny.
This is, to me, one of the biggest stories of last year, that they are on the warpath.
This never happens to left-wingers.
Never happens to liberals.
Oh, no, Drew, it was just an accident.
It was a bod.
It was an accident.
But the thing about it is, even though they restore you, and even though you can appeal to Jack and he puts you back, it makes you think twice about what you say.
And that's the point.
That's right.
That is the point.
I had some great material about asparagus.
LAUGHTER The key is that it probably was a mistake.
It probably was some agent who was just an idiot who did that.
But when you flip a coin a hundred times and it keeps coming up heads over and over and over, at a certain point you think the coin is rigged.
Because it is.
I mean, there's no chance that if somebody on the left had been hit with a warning about this sort of thing, that the agent would have said, you know what, I'm going to hit that suspend button for 12 hours.
Clearly this person is a threat to themselves or others.
But I'm sure that the person had heard of Jeremy or had heard of us and was like, well, they're conservative.
I'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
And if Jeremy and I were not friends and Jeremy were just relegated to the obscurity which he so richly deserved, the chances that Twitter ever would have gotten back to him or heard about it or recanted are pretty close to zero, right?
Jeremy would still be banned.
He'd still be suspended.
I mean, I don't have a blue checkmark.
This is an outrage, actually.
That is an outrage.
You are, after all.
My chihuahua has a blue checkmark on Twitter.
You deserve a blue checkmark.
I am certifiable, but not verifiable.
But it does speak to how the left, quote-unquote, tolerates humor.
I mean, obviously, the most high-profile example, this is what they've been doing to Louis C.K., which is just unbelievable.
Which, by the way, that material about the shooting was funny stuff.
Hilarious.
My favorite thing about that is that he told three jokes that were supposedly offensive, right?
He told the Parkland students joke, which is a very, very funny joke.
And then he said this stuff about gender neutrality, which was like, eh.
And then he made an Auschwitz joke, which was probably the least funny and most offensive of the jokes.
And no one cares about the Auschwitz jokes, right?
That was completely by the wayside.
Ah, the Jews, they can fend for themselves, as always.
It's like, oh, boy, they make fun of the Jews.
The Holocaust is a big scam.
It didn't really happen.
Right, well, that too, but it's...
Well, thanks for getting us demonetized on YouTube.
Appreciate that.
Hey, Jack, are you watching?
Hey, everybody.
So I just want to say for the record, you guys, that I don't think people should end their own lives.
I don't think people should unjustly take the lives of others.
And I don't deny that the Nazis were terrible people who committed a great atrocity and attempted genocide of...
Too late.
Your account's gone.
Too little too late.
I mean, first of all, Louis C.K. is probably my favorite working comic of the last 20 years.
Mm-hmm.
His stuff is really, really funny, and it has been for years.
And the fact that he's a personal shambles is, like, number one, no excuses.
He's a personal shambles, but have you seen this town?
I love all these people in Hollywood.
Louis C.K., his mistreatment of women.
I've never heard of anything like this, except at everyone at every party you've ever been to out here.
Have you ever met a comedian who's like, yes, I'm a very sane person and everything's going great.
Oh, I've got to be home by 6 for dinner.
They're known for being non-neurotic and deeply happy and really fulfilled and solid citizens is what they're known for.
But they couldn't even just say, listen, he's been banished and we must relegate him to the outer darkness.
We have to banish him to the cornfield and he has to stay in the cornfield.
He comes back and he makes the mistake of telling some jokes that conservatives aren't going to...
Like, if he'd come back and start just yelling about George W. Or he'd come back and start yelling about Trump.
No problem.
Then it would be like, is it time to welcome Louis C.K. back?
Let's have a No, even better would be if he had come back and talked about himself, not made any punchlines.
Yeah, yeah.
Right, the Hannah Gadsby version of humor.
This is my favorite.
This is my favorite.
It's the Hannah Gadsby humor, which is comedy is only comedy if you don't laugh at it.
The less you laugh at it, the better it is as comedy.
We've already rewritten biology, because men and women don't exist.
We've already rewritten language, because pronouns are no longer biological.
We've already rewritten religion, because we have to remove particular books that are too offensive to people.
We've already rewritten politics, because it turns out that the Senate is supposed to be popularly represented or something.
And now, we're rewriting the definition of the word comedy.
To me, in tragedy.
Right.
Well, actually, just boredom.
To me, just absolute sheer boredom.
Why was Louis C.K. banned in the first place?
He may have been a pervert, but he always asked permission first.
That was true.
By the left standards, he had consent.
Can I masturbate?
Yes, you can.
Please.
By the way, Sonny Bunch had the best take on what exactly Louis C.K. is going to do.
I think he's totally right about this.
I would not be surprised if this was leaked.
And people around Louis C.K. knew it was going to be leaked.
And then what his actual comedy routine is going to be is the first half of his comedy set will be all of this kind of conservative-friendly comedy.
And then the second half will be, look what terrible people we all are for having laughed at all of this.
And I know how terrible we are because I'm a terrible person too.
And then you see the left have to re-evaluate their opinion of Louis C.K. And then he does a full reversal in the second half of his act.
I hope that's not true.
I desperately hope it's not true because...
Also, this whole the new Louis C.K. is a curmudgeon.
These people were praising him for his transgressive comedy.
Right.
Five seconds ago.
That's what he did.
He does an entire routine and it is a hysterically funny routine called Of Course But Maybe.
Have you ever seen this routine?
It is one of the great comedy routines of the last 15 years.
In which he talks about all of these things that are deeply taboo.
And he says, of course they're terrible.
Of course they're terrible.
But maybe...
So, for example, he says, if you have a bunch of...
Of course.
Of course it's true that we have all these kids and they have peanut allergies.
And we wouldn't want children in school to be exposed to peanuts and they die of their peanut allergies.
So, of course, if you know some kid in the class has peanut allergies, then we should ban all the peanuts and all the peanut-associated products.
But maybe, if we didn't, then in like a generation there wouldn't be any more peanut allergies.
So you're telling me that making fun of kids with peanut allergies dying is not off limits.
But making fun of not even the Parkland kids who died, which would be terrible, but making fun of the kids who survived to be on the cover of Time magazine, that's taboo.
You know where he started to lose them to?
Because this has been building with Louis for a while, even before the masturbation scandal or whatever.
He told this joke that went viral, where it was an of course but maybe.
So of course abortion is nothing.
It's just like you in the bathroom.
It doesn't matter at all.
Either that or it's the killing of a human life.
And it was one of these, of course, but...
And it went viral, and it really started this...
I don't know, just a few months later, all of a sudden, every leftist...
I've become a bit suspicious that the whole Me Too movement is a way of killing off people that are getting in their way.
Like Bernie Sanders is now caught in his grip.
All the women in his campaign are complaining that they were treated badly.
I'm just wondering if they're just trying to get the old man out of the way so they can get to people who might actually win the presidency.
I think there are certain people who are authentic...
And sincere about this?
Of course.
But maybe.
There are some people who will use any political cover to club their political...
The thing about the Louis C.K. fit in particular, because you bring up the...
You said it as a joke, but it's actually important.
He actually had consent in every instance.
And people listening at home...
He was sick, but he wasn't a rape.
That's right.
People listening at home think, who would ever consent to letting a man masturbate in front of you?
Never mind the fact that Sarah Silverman and her sister and others say that they did, like by their own admission, that they consented to it every time.
But the truth is it's because people don't understand that what Donald Trump said in the latter days of the election about grabbing when you're famous, women will allow you to grab them.
He wasn't advocating sexual assault.
He was saying, when you're famous, women will consent to things that they would not...
So the average ma and pa out in middle America listening to a story about Louis C.K. is like, well, it's just not plausible that someone would let you do these things.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, Gene Simmons has had sex with 5,000 women while looking exactly like Gene Simmons.
And also being Gene Simmons.
One of the uncovered aspects of the Harvey Weinstein story, I think we all probably agree that Harvey Weinstein should have that guy from No Country for Old Men with a cattle thing and hit him in the forehead.
No question, he's a terrible, terrible person.
Absolutely.
But they're trying to keep him from releasing the emails he got from the women he slept with or annoyed.
Why?
Because they were all willing because they wanted the part in the movie.
And I think that that is an untold part of the story.
And you cannot, the New York Times has tried it, you cannot come out and say, well, yeah, I did it to get the part, but it's just not fair.
That's life.
Right, well, it is amazing how the feminist movement will say that a woman who completely is as promiscuous with her body as she wants to be, if you say that that's maybe a bad decision, then this makes you a sexist, an oppressive sexist.
You're blaming the victim.
But if she does all that, and then she decides later that that was a mistake because the guy was bad, then she's...
So, basically, she can go back in time.
She's got, like, the Marty McFly time machine.
And she can redefine the level of consensus.
The New York Times ran an op-ed saying sometimes yes means no, and men have to be sensitive to that.
I thought, not me.
To me, you know, you speak those words.
I mean, I actually agree with that on the moral level.
Of course.
But there's no way to enforce that.
There's just no enforceable mechanism for that.
No, you're asking us to be gentlemen, which I am 100% in favor of.
We all agree with that.
Exactly.
Yeah, all this is disturbing.
Yeah, it's all very disturbing, and it leads to a world where all justice is arbitrary justice.
That's the actual worst aspect of all of this, and we haven't talked enough about it, I think, about it on the right, that we rightly say that the state should be constrained by, like, you know, the Constitution, for example, which enumerates what rights, in its original intent, enumerated what few rights the government was going to have.
The federal government had, the state governments had.
We do that because we know that an arbitrary exercise of state power is evil.
Criminal law is no different.
That's still the state determining.
But cultural Most Moors wind up being exactly the same.
When you take a modern cultural moment and you rewrite history to judge the people of the past by the standards of the moment that we're in now, in contravention of the actual circumstances in which they live, you're committing an egregious injustice against them.
You're making the very idea of justice And this is the same thing at the border as if Donald Trump could speak an English sentence, he would explain that when you are basically...
I'm sorry, I pushed your imagination too far.
But when you say, you know, the border should be governed according to whether I have a sad picture of a child from Mexico standing there, that is basically saying it's all about your feelings, it's all about your compassion.
And compassion is...
Donald Trump has a good intuition here, because he's a showbiz creature, which is, he knows that when you put the little sad kid at the border, you get that picture, that's very powerful.
So he puts the sad mother, whose kid was killed by an illegal alien.
And we could talk, I mean, one thing I think the right should do, there were studies from Fusion, there were studies from, it was reported in the Huffington Post, from Amnesty International, 60 to 80% of women and girls who cross that border illegally are raped and sexually assaulted on the journey.
What about them?
Where's that image?
Where's that moral case?
And why isn't anybody saying, look, you know, pass a law, enforce the law.
Instead, you have Chuck Schumer waving a pen around.
I mean, one of the most shameful moments, I thought, in our political history is Chuck Schumer waving a pen around saying, Trump could solve this with a pen.
You go like, yeah, a king could solve it with a pen, but here we have guys called senators, Chuck.
And they pass laws, and that's how we do things.
And this is why, like, I generally oppose decriminalization efforts, so I don't like the decriminalization of marijuana.
I tend to have fairly libertarian leanings on this and think that marijuana should be legal.
Because you're a huge pothead.
Because I'm a huge pothead.
But thinking that something should be legal is not the same as thinking that we should not enforce the laws against while we have them.
That's right.
Because the state should not be able to arbitrarily determine Who gets something enforced upon them and who doesn't?
When you have that, you basically have these banana republics where bribing the guy who makes those arbitrary decisions is actually the path.
But nobody said a word when King Barak decided he was not going to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act.
That was enlightened.
Now you bring us to...
Donald Trump's spectacular press conference.
His glorious...
But before we can talk about that, we have to talk about dental hygiene.
And in particular, Quip.
I love Quip.
Quip's the best.
It's the best.
You all use Quip.
I do use Quip.
I'm going to confess that I'm the only person here who has not used...
And that's why you're missing two molars.
Show me on it, you guys.
Show me on it.
The way that you can tell Quip is so great is because there's a horrible picture of me in Vanity Fair of my T-book fantastic.
The teeth look just great, and that's because I use Quip twice a day.
Why is Quip so good?
Well, it's an electric toothbrush, but it's not just any electric toothbrush.
First of all, you don't have to use the stupid charging stand, so it goes dead on you all the time.
You stick a battery in the base of it, and it's good to go until the battery dies, which is months and months and months of time.
And it has these timed vibrations, so you're going to be brushing the exact right amount of time.
You're not going to be spending like 15 seconds, and you brush your teeth, and you're done, and then it turns out that you end up like Jeremy, toothless and friendless.
Instead, you end up with...
Oh, he was friendless before.
Instead, you actually brush the appropriate dentist-recommended amount of time.
Also, when you go to quip.com and you use quip.com slash backstage, you can also get, for a discount, new brush head sent to you on a regular schedule, which means that you're not going to have to worry about the fact that you've been using the same brush head for the last five years, and so that cold you had five years ago is still in danger of roaming around your mouth.
I do get attached to them.
I don't know what that is.
Quip is one of the first electric toothbrushes accepted by the American Dental Association.
I love Quip.
Everybody here loves Quip.
Quip starts at just $25.
If you go to getquip.com slash backstage right now, you get your first refill pack for free.
Again, that's first refill pack free at getquip.com slash backstage.
That's getquip.com slash backstage.
Go check it out right now and keep your mouth cleaner than this show is.
I'm legitimately going to get one.
You have to get one.
And then the next backstage, I'm going to give an honest assessment as to whether or not I like it.
And I'm definitely going to like it because they sponsor our show.
Yeah.
I actually...
That's honest.
You know what sold me on it?
It's funny because we actually have conversations about our sponsors sometimes off camera.
And just yesterday, Julia, who works here, and Michael and I were talking about how I'm the only human who still uses like a $2 over-the-counter...
You're like a gorilla.
What are you doing?
And Julia said that she had gotten equipped for Christmas because the guys are always promoting it and that it was terrific.
And I thought...
I'm kind of, at this point, a jerk if I don't get it.
The question is how people can tell the difference between the toothbrush and Julia.
Wow!
Well, me too.
This is amazing.
You mean because Quip toothbrushes look so cool and sexy?
Is that why?
They're sleek and beautiful.
Because Julia's like a fish.
If she turns sideways, she disappears.
Julia is very petite, and is a beautiful girl, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Donald Trump.
Who?
Donald Trump, the President of these United States, held a press conference.
We're going to talk about it, but before we do, Elisha Krause, who is holding a kind of press conference of her own, in which She talks directly to the people and then tells us what the people said.
What are the people saying?
But only the subscriber people, because we're not the United States and we don't have to talk to all the people.
Speaking of talking to all the people, my conspiracy coroner theory is not going to happen in 2019.
I thought that Speaker Pelosi might not invite Donald Trump, but you mentioned our next backstage looks like it's going to be State of the Union on January 29th.
That tweet just went out a little bit ago.
Oh my goodness.
Speaker Pelosi did invite the president.
So Tuesday, January 29th, next backstage.
If he accepts the invitation.
Please tell me he doesn't.
It's my least favorite spectacle in all of American politics.
I actually thought it would be such a win-win if she didn't invite him.
That'd be great.
I was kind of betting on it.
That'd be great.
And he could just send a letter.
He could do what George Washington used to do.
Yes.
He'd just send a letter.
And it would be a Trumpian letter.
It'd be like, this is the greatest speech you've ever seen.
It's unbelievable.
Fantastic.
It's just a presaurus entry for terrific.
But we do have questions from our subscribers.
Anthony wants to know, he says that all of y'all have been discussing your 2019 predictions for United States politics, but what's a hope that you have for The Daily Wire in 2019?
Well, you know mine.
See you guys.
He said it out loud.
If you say it out loud, it can't come true.
Did you know that?
He says it three times, though.
Did I just imply it?
I was very careful, I think.
Okay, so anybody have any wishes for the Daily Wire other than the obvious?
Well, I will say, at the risk of...
I don't think I've ever said anything nice to you, so at the risk of flattering you, I will say that your radio show starts on Monday.
I think it's going to be huge.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it.
That's very nice of you.
And at the risk of flattering me, my book also comes out this year.
That's happening.
But that's not a daily book.
I'm not really annoyed about it.
You brought your book out.
My book, Another Kingdom, is coming out at the same time as yours.
You scheduled it.
I want you to give away copies of my book with your book.
Everyone should just buy it.
They should just buy the audiobook, though, of Another Kingdom.
Are you recording?
I'm doing the audiobook, baby.
You didn't tell me.
I am.
I'm doing it next week.
There you go.
None of these things involve the Daily Wire.
Oh, yeah.
Sorry.
These are your personal projects.
I can't believe how selfish I don't make any money off of anything you just said.
We'll give you some money.
Oh, man.
Alicia, what's next?
All right.
Well, apparently Jeremy wants Daily Wire to make more money in 2019, so sign up and subscribe.
And how.
This question from Brooke is, everyone has a price, so what do you all think that the Democrats will ask for if Trump never backs down on the wall in return for the funding of the wall?
I don't think they're going to back down.
I think he will, so I think it's a moot point.
You think he will back down?
Yeah, I think that it'll come to a point where he just says, now there's a Democratic Congress.
To hell with these guys.
I have to sign something.
I'm the president.
I think it'll be some sort of pittance where he says, there's border funding provided, and I'm going to fungibly use that money for a wall.
That's what I think he's going to do.
The timing of the Syria withdrawal is kind of curious, because he positioned the wall as national security.
He said, we can build it out of the Pentagon.
And then all of a sudden, he says, we're pulling all the troops out of Syria.
They've got, what is it, $15 billion allotted for the effort in Syria?
He was only asking $5 billion for the wall.
That only buys you, I think, a block and a half of the wall.
But still, he's got 3x that.
I think it'll be leverage to use that Pentagon money to build the wall.
My favorite is when you I think there's strategy involved in anything that's going on.
I want to compliment you on the use of the word fungible, an excellent word, but I think that's exactly what's going to happen.
I think they're going to have undesignated money, so Nancy Pelosi doesn't have to lose face.
But at the same time, Trump can say, oh, she can say, well, if you want to waste it on a wall, go ahead.
I'd use it for something else.
I use it for these poor, sick children.
And he says, and I want a wall that's made of spikes.
I want it made of children.
That was great when he tweeted out the actual pictures of the steel slats.
And he had, like, circled the pointy ends.
That was so great.
I was just hoping that he would decorate it with the heads of his enemies.
He did not use the word fungible, unfortunately.
No, he did not.
Is it possible?
He puts the fun in fungible.
I mean, how does the president win in a world where even if he gets the $5 billion, he will legitimately be able to, as you say, build a block and a half of wall?
And that'll be in the moment of political victory.
But if two years from now the president's going into re-election and he's saying, we started building a beautiful wall, it is 180 feet longer than it was when I became president, after all this circus, I don't think people are going to buy that.
Oh, no, no, it's not going to matter.
It's not going to matter one iota.
Because he's just going to say, I built...
I built these three inches of beautiful, gleaming, golden wall.
And my enemies would not have built these three inches of beautiful, gleaming, golden wall.
That's all.
This is getting a little scary, Shapiro.
I don't think there are that many conservatives who deeply care whether he does it or not.
I think they care about the...
The feeling that he wants to do it.
I think that so much of politics has become about this.
I read something, I'm trying to remember from whom today, saying, I think it was Jonathan Chait saying that conservatives are not transactional with President Trump, that they don't like him for transactional reasons.
And I think that's half right and half wrong.
He's right in the sense that If he didn't deliver half of his policy proposals, conservatives would probably be okay with that.
But the transaction that they're actually into is the feeling that he would like to do that.
Meaning that if he had the power to do it, he probably would.
I don't know, though.
Ask Ann Coulter.
I mean, ask some of his biggest supporters.
Listen, I think that Ann Coulter is the only honest transactional person with regard to President Trump.
She should be the...
If she got the wall, she was going to be happy with it.
If she was not going to build the wall, then she wasn't going to be happy with it.
But you know, Heather McDonald over at Manhattan Institute wrote an article in City Journal today or yesterday saying what Trump should do is he should say, okay, forget the wall.
Give me money for E-Verify.
And then really put them on the spot.
But he can't do that because they want to hear that word.
They want to hear the wall, the wall, the wall.
Plus, I disagree with E-Verify completely, but your strategic point is great.
Elisha, it is my New Year's resolution.
I have hereby resolved, as God-King of the Daily Wire, that we will get to a third subscriber question.
These subscribers actually give us, you guys, their hard-earned mammon every month.
And they get to ask us these questions.
So we can serve both the God-King and mammon.
That's right.
Alright, this question comes from Alex.
It's for Ben.
He wants to know, do you think the left is going to be so fragmented in 2020 that they won't be able to pull support behind one candidate?
Hmm, maybe sounds like the GOP in 2016.
And if they can pull support behind one candidate, who do you think it'll be?
So, number one, I do think there's an actual possibility of a brokered convention for the Democrats.
I do think there's the possibility that you see such a split that it's impossible for them to put it together.
Because remember, they got rid of the superdelegates and they rejiggered their primary process.
So that means that what you actually could see is a bunch of people with a bunch of different delegates and people actually brokering at the convention if enough interesting candidates run.
Now, I think It's a prediction episode.
I will predict that Beto O'Rourke is the nominee.
And when all is said and done, that the media mobilizes behind Beto.
Beto is out Bernie-ing Bernie right now.
Basically, there are three parts of the Democratic Party.
There's the intersectional base.
There is the kind of old-school Democrat Hillary Clinton base that still exists.
And there is the socialist Bernie Sanders side.
of those three categories in order to have a shot at the nomination.
Well, Bernie is really only in one of those.
He's not in intersectionality land and he's not in Hillary land.
And if you look at Biden, Biden is really in Hillary land and not very much in Bernie land and not really very much in intersectionality land.
Beto is not in intersectionality land, but he is in both Bernie land and traditional Hillary land.
And he's doing a pretty good job pandering to intersectionality land as well with the help of the media.
So I think that the enthusiasm is gonna be behind him.
I think the Bernie missed his mark in 2016.
He is an Irishman who self-identifies as Hispanic.
That's true.
That's pretty interesting.
It actually matters, though.
It really does.
If his name were Robert O'Rourke, he would be done.
That's right.
But he goes by Beto, and so that changes everything.
I think that the Democrats, once they get to the general, they'll mobilize to stop Trump because Trump is the great unifier.
We saw this in the 2018 elections.
Listen, I mean, we could do right now odds-making on the 2020 election.
I'm pessimistic.
I'm pessimistic just because after 2018, you have presidential levels of turnout, and Republicans show up.
I mean, Republicans did show up in 2018.
We got swamped by nearly nine points in the popular vote.
That is ugly.
I mean, that's worse than it was in 2006.
I mean, it's really, really bad.
And President Trump's popularity in places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, he'll still win Ohio, but I think he's going to have some trouble In a lot of the other swing states, all he has to do is lose, like, one of those states, and he's pretty much done.
So, you know, if I have to put his re-election odds right now, I would say that he is, like, a 40% chance at being a winner versus almost any Democrat that comes out of the pack, except maybe Elizabeth Warren, because she's just...
By the way, I'm shocked at how terrible she is.
I'm shocked at it.
I didn't think it was possible for anyone to be as terrible as she is.
But her mechanically drinking beer on an Instagram, like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who can act like an authentic 29-year-old because she's authentically 29.
But Elizabeth Warren being like, bring me a beer!
Husband, bring me a beer.
Yes, my sweetie, my darling.
And he's like, ah!
You know what's amazing, too, about her announcement?
When she came out and said, I'm forming the Exploratory Committee, she did that press conference, and one of the first questions, a reporter said, how do you answer the people who like you, they like your policies, but they worry you're not electable because you're a fraud?
And she had no answer.
She's had years to come up with an answer.
She still has none.
I thought it was a little strange that her Exploratory Committee was a scout who went up to the top of my head.
LAUGHTER See if the cavalry was coming out.
I mean, what do you guys think the odds are on re-election right now?
If you have to peg it now.
I'm not saying, like, if things change radically.
If I had to peg it now, I would peg it at 50-50.
And I know that's a little bit...
Weasley?
Yeah, pretty weasley.
I'm not saying you're a weasel here.
Just weasley.
I think that's the important...
Minor user resolution was to be so much nicer than it was last year.
I'm not saying you're a weasel.
But I think the reason is a lot of the people, the GOP suburbanites who showed up and didn't like Trump, are not gonna vote for Kamala Harris, they're not gonna vote for Beto O'Rourke, and they will show up again, and they will vote for Trump in that situation.
So that's what raises my hopes for him.
The guy, you know, the guy had a great first year.
He really did.
I mean, when you look at his achievements, he rolled on that in the second year that he had, the things that he did in the first year made the economy take off.
And it just depends how crazy he gets, because I really do believe that this Russian collusion thing, where he has a point, he has a legitimate point, but I think it's driving him a little nuts.
Like he's gotten, he doesn't even promote the things that he's done.
He doesn't even go out like any other president would do and say, look, look what I did.
You know, I did this stuff.
It's all this hyperbole.
Like his first tweet of the new year, which is the all caps, just, you know, sit back and enjoy.
Sit back and enjoy.
Or whatever it was.
Happy new year to the, even to the haters.
The only person who's going to do that is me.
Is that right?
But the fact that it was in all caps was basically everything.
Because the truth is, things are pretty good.
Like, we all went on vacation.
There was a government shutdown.
Did anyone feel like everything was terrible?
Like, when we all logged off Twitter for five minutes, we were like, yeah, everything's kind of great.
Does it feel like the government's shut down?
No.
The only thing that'll make you feel bad is turning on social media or looking at your retirement savings account right now.
Right.
Because the market's...
The markets have taken a severe hit, and his trade policy does have something to do with that.
That's what Apple said today, and I don't think they're completely wrong.
But with all of that said, it's the feeling of sheer, unadulterated panic that reeks off the man that is really his biggest problem.
He doesn't give you a feeling of quietude.
What you want in a president, it really is an important thing.
What you want in a president, and W did have this.
It was a feeling like, you know what, I can go to sleep at night.
It's not going to be chaos when I wake up in the morning.
It's just going to be a normal day, and the sun will rise in the east.
Even with Obama, who is awful, who is predictably awful, who is awful in predictable ways.
And what people, I think, actually want is not to be bothered.
We all live at a certain level of stasis in our lives, even if our lives suck.
You live at a certain level of stasis.
This is why they've done all sorts of social science studies.
And what they find is that people, their average level of happiness across the course of their life doesn't change all that markedly.
You'll see spikes or you'll see shocks, but it pretty much returns to normal right after the spike or the shock because we're used to a certain level of stasis in our lives.
Trump upends the stasis so regularly that it makes you feel uncomfortable.
It makes you feel like, I can't take an hour break without Jim Mattis stepping down.
I can't take an hour break without Trump doing something.
General Mattis being fired.
One of the things I like about Trump is his war with the media, who absolutely deserve it.
They deserve everything he gives them.
But the reason it works so well is because he is them.
He does the same thing.
Whenever there's a Republican in government, the press mobilizes to create that exact sense of chaos so that when things actually do go wrong, like the hurricane in New Orleans under George W. Bush...
You think it's the end of a long train of chaotic things, but it's not really.
It's just the first time they could get their hands on him.
They could lay a glove on him.
The problem with Trump is that he hits back, but he creates the same level of chaos.
And so for the gift we get of the press being slapped around, which is a joy and a delight to behold, we also get the sense that everything is kind of unnervingly awful when things are really pretty good.
Yes, however, I will say because we're in this very shallow moment of culture where politics is everything, where we elected a reality TV store, where all we do is talk politics, we don't talk culture, we don't talk movies, we don't talk religion, I think people want a little bit of excitement.
And I think he brings that show business and he brings that excitement.
And the one good thing about Pelosi taking over right now is he does a lot better against an adversary than he does when it's just him running the show.
He does a lot better against an adversary.
That's my first one.
I decided I was going to have one interesting take.
I do think that's true.
I think Trump needs an enemy, and he will create enemies if he doesn't have them.
He doesn't have that problem now.
He's certainly going to have that, but I do think that if the Democrats had any brains at all, we all know this, the biggest mistake they could make is to nominate somebody who's radical and feels like they're going to upend the system.
The best thing they could do right now is run a Warren G. Harding 1920 return to normalcy campaign.
This has all been crazy.
They're not going to do that, are they?
No, but this is the point I'm thinking, and it speaks to what we're saying, which is that the American people are entertained out at this point.
That's why if they would just run Joe Biden, I think they'd win all 57 states.
Because people do want to go back.
People don't think in terms of policy.
Yes, this is right.
So no one on our side wants to go back to the policies of the Barack Obama administration.
But there are millions of people who would like to go back to just the kind of feeling that even Republicans who didn't like things that were happening during the Obama era at least felt like, as you said, there was a method to the madness.
So in a way, we even sort of resigned ourselves to being in opposition to what the Obama administration was doing.
It felt like a steady pressure.
Right.
Well, it's what the Joker says in The Dark Knight, right?
When the Joker says...
He's not wrong.
When the Joker says in The Dark Knight that everybody is okay with terrible things happening so long as there's a plan, but when there's no plan, everybody feels like it's chaos.
And Trump is the Joker.
He's the guy setting piles of money on fire.
And even if things are pretty good...
And listen, everybody in this room, I think it is safe to say, wants to see Trump in a second term as opposed to any of the Democrats that we're currently talking about.
And so when we're saying all this, we're saying all this with the idea in mind that President Trump, if you were to listen to this, Just stop.
I know you think that this is the gal that brung you and you've got to dance with the gal that brung you.
I mean, first of all, that would be a unique thing for the president to actually dance with the gal that brought him.
He's never actually done that before.
You just said he's listening.
Don't say those things.
Fair enough.
But the fact that he thinks that what got him here was that feeling of chaos.
And that's true.
But that's a different thing.
The girl wants to date the bad boy until she decides to get married to him, at which point she wants him to cease riding the motorcycle and hanging around in dive bars.
This speaks to Selena Zito's theory, which I think is a pretty good theory, that these wave elections that we keep saying are waves for the other side, are waves for the Democrats, are waves for the Republicans, are really the country trying to get the car to the center of the road where most people live, and it's just veering right and left.
Well, that's why if Obama had governed from the center...
He would have won 80% of the vote in 2016.
In 2012.
Obama's first term is the biggest missed opportunity in the last century.
I mean, I know you and I agree that 2012 broke the country.
I think 2012 destroyed the country.
In so many ways.
We took an honorable guy, Mitt Romney, and we just trashed him.
And it trashed Romney, too.
I'm happy to trash Romney these days.
We can get to Romney in a second.
First, in a bad economy, as Daily Wire God King, the guy who's responsible for making sure you all get paid, one of the tricks to getting you all paid is a concept that I made up when I was skipping college.
And I was thinking, if you want to make it in business, if you want to make it economically, if you want to have more than you used to have, and this is what I came up with, it's called buy low.
Sell high.
This is why he's the guy.
I've got to write that down.
Right now, the market is down.
Buy low.
But where could you do such a thing?
Robinhood.
The fact is that if you are looking to invest, then you actually have to know something about investment.
And one of the ways to get to know about investment is to actually invest your money at least a little bit and play with the market and get to learn the market.
And that's where Robinhood is really great.
It's an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, We're good to go.
In just four taps on your smartphone, it'll aggregate groups for you.
So if you're interested in things like the 100 most popular or entertainment sectors, it'll group lists for you and then give you a buy, hold, sell rating for every stock.
So it's giving you all sorts of information to play with.
And you learn by doing.
I mean, this really is true.
It's true at every job you've ever held.
You learn by doing.
The same thing is true when you're trading in the market.
Robinhood right now is giving our listeners a free stock I've looked at the app.
It really is beautifully constructed.
And again, that no-commission fee structure is really spectacular.
Dailywire.robinhood.com.
Great way to learn to invest.
Tell him that the God King told you to buy low.
Good time to get some Apple stock.
This is actually one of the great benefits of Robin Hood is I'm financially illiterate and it teaches you along the way.
It has literally no skill sets.
He fails up.
This is why, as we all know, my wife takes care of me.
I'm an artist and she didn't take care of me.
I'd be living in a dumpster.
But I have asked them to sign me on to Robin Hood so I can learn this stuff so that I can finally get rid of the old woman.
So we billed today's episode as the 2019 prediction.
Oh, the prediction episode.
The prediction special.
So I want to talk about what we think is about to happen, but I also first want to talk about the things that did happen.
We didn't have a retrospective because our Christmas episode was like on November 8th.
Beginning of December.
It's so early.
And much to Ben's chagrin, all we talked about was, like, the history and theology of Christianity.
It was Michael Knowles doing 15 minutes on Advent.
So should we get back now to the Anthony?
Just get me a hot cast iron rod.
Yeah, we've got a couple days.
No good, no good.
So I want to talk about what you think was the greatest political moment of 2018.
It's easy for me.
Yeah, I think we probably all have the same one.
It's got to be the Kavanaugh confirmation.
I mean, they threw hell at us, basically.
They pulled out all the stops.
And not only did we win, not only was Kavanaugh...
Confirmed.
But they were revealed as being who they are.
They were revealed as willing to destroy any human being, any principle of American governance to get what they want.
And the people saw it, and I think it's going to reverberate.
These are the things that seep into the culture.
These are the things that you don't even know what the effect is until 10 years later when you look back and say, you know, from that moment, something happened.
I remember feeling when it happened, this is the pinnacle of the Trump administration, at least in the first term.
I think that's right.
And I remember thinking, enjoy it because soon the midterms are coming and then you'll be depressed.
And that was exactly the way it turned out.
I thought it was a beautiful moment because everything they did was not just wrong, it was bad.
It was bad what the left did, and they stopped them.
And that's a great thing.
Well, the Lindsey Graham 2.0 was the best name.
Lindsey Graham 2.0, which was such an improvement.
I mean, the upgrade was just tremendous.
And it was a reminder that when we tell that whole story, the one name that we don't really say very much is President Trump, who actually did the right thing, right?
He stuck with Kavanaugh.
He didn't remove him.
And he gets credit for that, for sure.
But it was that Trump was not in the headlines every day.
The Democrats were in the headlines every day.
And so this is going to be the question going forward for 2020.
Who's going to be in the headlines every day?
If the Democrats are in the headlines every day with impeachment and with whatever nonsensical plans they're pushing and with free education for everybody and free health care for everybody and all their garbage, then Trump has a shot at re-election.
If Trump is in the headlines every day, I agree.
I actually think this brings me to one of my 2019 predictions, which is if one of the great, possibly the greatest 2018 political moment is the Kavanaugh hearing process, I think one of the great disappointments for the right in 2019 is going to be seeing how Kavanaugh actually works as a...
There are some of us who are doubtful.
What we forget is that he was hand-selected by Kennedy to be Kennedy's replacement.
And we all, because of this sort of partisan reactionary movement on the right that's so strong right now, he gets nominated and we immediately go, oh, he's the greatest!
Trump's going to be better at the Supreme Court than anyone who's ever lived!
Kennedy picked him to continue Kennedy's legacy on the court.
You've got to remember, though, a lot of conservatives were pulling for other people.
Amy Barrett, other people.
And it was really when the Democrats came out and accused him of being a gang rapist.
That was really everyone then galvanized behind him.
But he might be a disappointment.
The one thing I don't think he'll be a disappointment on, and it just happens to be a hobby horse of mine, is Chevron.
Right, no, this is right.
He'll leave it on Chevron.
That's a big one.
For people who don't know what Chevron deference is, basically, administrative agencies all have these adjudicatory bodies where if you have a problem with the EPA, you have to then appeal the EPA's decision to the administrative body within the EPA that makes these decisions.
And there is a big question as to whether a court can then review that decision, whether an administrative agency is subject to review de novo, meaning that they can actually look at the case itself and then overrule the EPA's interpretation of its own law.
And Chevron deference basically says that unless there's a plain error that was made in the reading of the statute, then you have to give the administrative agency all sorts of leeway to do this.
Well, Kavanaugh, to his great credit, has said that doesn't exist if the EPA is ruling for its own benefit.
And we don't have to take their word for anything, in other words.
We can review each of these cases without any sort of deference.
He's against Chevron deference, which is one area where he is really good.
So if we all basically agree on the number one political story of 2018, let's argue over the number two political story of 2018.
What stood out for you, Ben?
I would have to say that the social media collapse has been the big one.
I mean, the kind of building rage against Twitter and Facebook.
And some for good reason and some for really bad reason.
So I think that the...
Unsurprisingly, I think conservatives are correct to be deeply skeptical that a bunch of leftists who design algorithms in Silicon Valley are going to be honest with them about how exactly these algorithms are then applied.
So people on the leftists said, well, Daily Wire does really well over at Facebook.
And we do.
I mean, we have a great team.
We have a great social media team.
We do really well with Facebook.
That's true.
But it is also true that early in 2017, Facebook decided basically to destroy the entire right on Facebook.
And we were part of that.
And so when Facebook or YouTube or Twitter crack down on people, they're only cracking down on people on one side of the aisle.
They're not cracking down on people on the other side of the aisle.
And so I think that's a legit concern because all the people in Silicon Valley really do have the sort of hooli view of what they're supposed to do on Silicon Valley.
The don't be evil Google schtick.
Then they think don't be evil means crack down on people who are on the right.
It's as Tim Cook of Apple said, it'd be a sin if we allowed people to say hateful things on our platforms.
Well, you're not God.
You don't get to decide that.
But he said he was, basically.
He said that inner voice was going to guide him.
I mean, when you use the word sin about your own judgment, then pretty much you are saying you're not.
Our friend Alan Estrin from PragerU, you were in this conversation.
You may be able to recount it better than I can.
His whole thing about the Apple 1984 ad.
That's right.
Do you remember his speech about that?
Of course not.
I was tuned out for the entire thing.
But there really is this great irony in that night.
For those who don't remember, the 1984 ad with Apple, the Mac is coming out, and they run down the movie theater aisle.
They smash the brainwashing Big Brother, and they're going to be the new creative, innovative disruptors.
They are now Big Brother.
They are now 1984.
Tim Book is.
But here's the...
So those are, I think, legit criticisms.
Here are criticisms I do not think are legit.
So I think that all of the people who are deeply...
Maybe you guys disagree with this.
All the people who are deeply worried about the invasion of our privacy by Facebook, which is taking public data and then selling it, If you're stupid enough to put a bunch of your information on Facebook on a free platform, what do you think they are doing with that information?
How did you think they were making their money?
Did you think that they were just making their money by you sitting there and not looking at ads?
I think no one really cares about the privacy.
I think it's all censorship.
So I think that people care about censorship, but I think the reason that you're seeing bipartisan disapproval of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter has nothing to do with the actual reason that the left is saying, right?
So the left is saying it's all about privacy and my concerns with privacy and what all these companies are doing with my info.
No.
What the left is actually concerned with is controlling the censorship.
And so what they are actually upset about is that Donald Trump won in 2016.
And they think that if they can control the social media by basically threatening them with legislation on the basis of privacy, then they can get all their social media friends in Silicon Valley to turn off all the right-wingers.
Let me push back on this.
It's important because we say that as Americans, and it's true, but the left had an agenda, sort of a universal agenda for the last century before this moment.
And we're seeing it play out in Europe, and I worry that we're going to see it here, which is this whole GDPR movement in Europe.
Basically the European Union passed a law that went into effect a few months ago about how websites that operate anywhere where a European citizen might be able to interface with it.
So it actually applies to American companies here.
That the way that we store and deal with user data is now regulated by the EU and subject to fines.
And the fines can be $20 million.
And so you may have noticed if you go to websites over the last three or four months, maybe undoubtedly all of your favorite websites have started doing this thing where you have to, like, elect to use cookies.
Right?
And that's not...
That's not like the letter of the law of the GDPR movement, but it's a result of the GDPR. The reason it all happened on one day, that's the day that GDPR went into effect.
It's going to cost companies like Google and Facebook billions of dollars in Europe.
But for smaller operations like the Daily Wire, it presents real challenges.
It actually makes us question whether or not we should make our content available in Europe at all, because it's so onerous, the restrictions on how you can use data now.
And so while I agree that in the exact moment we're in, the left actually doesn't care about privacy.
They only care about sort of pressuring these social media organizations to not let Donald Trump get reelected.
They do have a secondary agenda, which is control everything and take everybody's money.
And they are going to do that in the name of privacy.
Well, see, this is why I think some of the arguments on the right are a little bit clueless I actually wanted you to address this, because you explained it to me, and I've been explaining it to other people, and it's important.
When we hear right-wingers say, well, they're private companies, they have a right to do whatever they want, essentially, that's not true.
First of all, the First Amendment protects our right to free speech from the government.
But our right to free speech comes from God.
And so if you have essentially a monopoly on information, you have to be stopped from censoring people.
You have to be stopped.
And you explain to me why that is perfectly legal and perfectly within the realm of capitalism to do that.
And I think you should talk about it because most people don't understand it.
Yeah, so it's based on this thing called the Communications Decency Act.
And there's a section of it, Section 230, which basically applies here.
What it comes down to is a question of liability.
There's a reason that major news publications have fact checkers.
There's a reason that if the New York Times, for example, were to write a story about Ben in which they say Ben is known to lure children to his house who are then never seen again.
You're right.
That's the point.
There's no evidence.
Ben would have a legal case against the New York Times for publishing libelous Slanders.
Defamation of character.
Because they're a publisher.
And because they have editorial control over what they publish.
And if they're publishing things that are knowingly untrue and meant to do someone harm, they open themselves up to pretty extreme legal liabilities.
So, enter Silicon Valley.
Enter Google.
Enter YouTube.
Enter Facebook.
Enter Twitter.
Enter Instagram.
They, in theory, are not publishers.
They're platforms.
Their argument is...
We don't publish anything.
We open up a platform for you, the user, to publish.
No one could publish Facebook.
There's millions of posts.
No one could publish YouTube.
They're like a phone line.
They're like a phone line.
And so they say, we can't be held responsible if slanderous, libelous, defamatory things are said on our platform.
If I got on the phone with Jeremy and I said something bad about Drew, you wouldn't hold the phone company responsible.
You couldn't sue AT&T over your conversation.
Right.
So, the government agreed.
And they said, we won't hold you responsible for the things that are published on your platforms by users.
If you remain a free and open platform.
Now, of course, as even with free speech, famously you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, right?
That's sort of an overrule, but yeah.
But there are some very general...
You can't threaten violence.
You're not allowed to incite violence.
But generally speaking, and the argument that was made by these tech companies at the time was, we're going to not play a political role.
We're going to allow people to publish their...
Their opinions, and for that reason, they received shielding by Congress from lawsuits.
Now they're saying, well, we have a responsibility.
It would be a sin if we didn't.
We have to execute editorial control over things that are being written to make the world a better place, to make the world a friendlier place, make the world a more generous place.
And the argument is, well, cool.
If that's true, A lot of terrible things are said about us on your platform.
A lot of untrue.
A lot of things meant to incite harm to us.
Now you're a publisher.
Which is why if I had been Alex Jones, The asshat who was banned from Twitter and thinks that they're making the frog say.
If I had been Alex Jones when I was banned from Twitter, which he should not have been, I would have filed two concurrent lawsuits.
In lawsuit number one, I would have sued Twitter for...
For removing me, for removing my opportunity to publish my own views on their free and open platform.
Lawsuit number two, I would have sued Twitter for all of the horribly defamatory things that were published on their platform about me in the wake of me being suspended.
And I would have made Twitter defend in two separate cases On the one hand, explain how you're not liable for the slanderous things that were published about me, while on the other hand saying that you have no editorial...
That's exactly right.
And if the right were not so clueless about this stuff, we basically just want to be on Twitter.
And so when Alex Jones goes and nobody likes Alex Jones, the guy's a loon, you know, nobody defends him.
But he needs to be defended.
Of course he needs to be defended.
I'll just defend this one point.
They are turning the frickin' frogs gay, aren't they?
They're making the frickin' frogs gay, I guess.
But nothing's wrong with that.
Yeah, but what's wrong with that?
Who am I to judge?
Who are you to judge a gay frog, for Christ?
Well, I mean, if Kevin Hart had said that, then they'd get him from the Oscars.
By the way, I think that the only people who are willing to host the Oscars are probably in this room at this point.
No, and I think what happened to Kevin Hart, I mean, to me, this is the stuff that is absolutely terrible that's happening.
Well, so I've coined this word that I'm definitely trying to catch on.
It's going to be fetch.
I'm really trying to get this word caught.
Woke scold.
I actually like this word.
I think it's pretty good.
Because these people, they are woke scolds.
This is what they do.
And it can be used as a verb also in the fashion that we use all nouns as verbs.
How many of them are there?
So this is my point.
I don't think there are that many of them.
So I think there are maybe...
I think there are hundreds of thousands.
I don't think it's tens of thousands.
But I think that the ones who are super active and actually get this stuff done...
I think you're talking about a group of 500 people.
Really.
And these are the people who call up Tucker Carlson's advertisers and bug them.
These are the people who decide they're going to go after Kevin Hart on Twitter.
It's basically like sleeping giants in Media Matters.
And what they do is they sit around all day because they're bored and terrible, awful people...
And rich.
And yeah, some of them are rich.
And what they do is they then mobilize to harass one person and ruin that person's life for a day.
And then that person goes up the chain and says, my life was ruined today.
And somebody says, you know what?
It'll just be easier for us to disassociate from this human being.
And you know how I know that this is true?
Because we have used this tactic ourselves.
So Jeremy and I, before we ran Daily Wire, we ran a group called Truth Revolt.
Oh, right.
You were there.
I was there.
And Truth Revolt was specifically designed as a mutually assured destruction group.
We said this openly, that we hate the tactics we're using, but the left needs to learn that they can't just bully people into silence.
And so what we would do is if there was somebody who said something terrible, like Martin Bashir, saying that he wanted to defecate into Sarah Palin's mouth.
Do we actually think that Martin Bashir should lose advertisers over that?
Not really.
I think he's a schmuck, right?
I mean, I think people shouldn't watch his show, but I think advertisers should be able to advertise wherever they want.
But we had a group of activists, and we told all of our activists, call this line at this advertiser and tell them you don't want to see their advertising on Bashir's show.
Now, the advertiser doesn't know whether these people were actually shopping with them or getting insurance with them or any of that kind of stuff.
All they know is that that day, their entire customer service team was overwhelmed with, like, 30 phone calls.
And that was the entirety of it.
It was like 30 people who would call.
And then the advertiser would be asked on Twitter or publicly, are you going to keep advertising on Martin Bashir after he said X, Y, and Z? And they would feel inconvenienced for like a minute.
And then they would say, okay, we're pulling our advertising.
The reason that I'm bringing this up is not because this is a good tactic.
It's not.
That's the reason I'm bringing it up.
Advertisers need to understand that a bad day does not mean that if you kept advertising on Martin Bashir, you would lose your entire business.
And this is also true on Twitter.
It's true of comedians.
Like, this is why Bill Burr, God bless him, is never going to be taken down by these people.
Because if these people ever tried to take down Bill Burr by saying, like, you said X 10 years ago, he'd just say F you.
FU is the single most powerful tool.
So what?
The person who used to say this to me was Andrew Breitbart, who took as much flack as anybody that any of us have ever known.
And he always used to say, and it was hard for him because he's a human being, right?
And I take a lot of flack too, and it's hard.
We all do in this room, actually.
He always used to say, walk towards the fire.
One of the empowering things in being on the right, and I think Trump has done this for a lot of people, is the feeling like they're shooting the arrows, and it feels like Boromir at the end of the first Lord of the Rings.
You're getting hit with arrow, arrow, arrow.
But at a certain point, you realize the arrows actually don't hit you.
That they bounce off you.
Just saying, you know what, go screw yourself.
Most people don't care.
About anything.
And you know what?
I've actually taken a fairly big hit for my opinions.
I think I can say financially I've taken a really big hit.
I lost contracts in Hollywood that were worth, I'm sorry, but they were worth millions of dollars.
We'd pay you a lot more if your opinions were better.
In the end, if you're an American, who wants to live afraid?
Who wants to live silent?
We all go and talk to college kids, and they always come up and they ask the question, how can I say this and that?
And what they really mean is, how can I say this and that without consequence?
And the answer is, you can't.
You can't.
This is what being an American is all about.
And we all carry the culture.
Every one of us carries the culture in our two hands.
We have a responsibility to take some hits.
I gotta tell you, this is shocking, but speaking of those college kids, I'm actually more pessimistic than Ben on this, on the woke fetches, on the woke scolds, which is that I don't think it's terribly small.
I think it is, in the broad American population, it's very small, but it skews so young.
And there are so many of these young kids.
Jerry Seinfeld said this.
Well, it feels powerful.
It gives them a feeling of It gives them a feeling of power.
And Seinfeld said he won't play college campuses anymore because they call everything racist.
They call everything sexist.
I mean, I see a lot of it.
We all do.
And all they have to do is make it slightly...
The people that the woke scolds are aiming at are the people who are decent but kind of apathetic and don't want to be bothered.
Those are the actual people they're aiming at.
Not at me and not at Tucker and not at...
What they're really aiming at, and this is one of the great unspoken truths of America...
They're aiming at boards of directors of corporations who are risk averse.
And the unfortunate reality is that the corporate board in America has given us the left-wing agenda.
Almost everything that we actually think is wrong in the culture is being promulgated by probably people who donate to Republicans.
They make a lot of money sitting on boards.
They probably go to the country club.
They've all eaten at Mar-a-Lago.
But they're so risk averse in their business that they give us frivolous sexual harassment policies.
They give us pulling money out of anybody who says an opinion that they agree with, but that gets any heat brought on them.
They fund all the colleges.
They fund all the colleges.
It's too big a topic for us to go to today, but we should, on one of these in the future, really talk about the danger.
How can we win back?
How can we give metal and spines to these board members at these companies?
Because if they would fight the wars, we wouldn't be losing.
But first we have to talk about a good corporation.
A good company.
A great company.
A company with company in their name.
That's how serious they are.
But these guys are legitimate badasses.
The folks over at Bravo Company Manufacturing.
So you know that all of us here in the room Are big believers in the Second Amendment.
Believe in our Second Amendment rights.
Believe in your right to keep and bear arms to protect all of your other rights.
Well, Bravo Company Manufacturing was started in a garage by a Marine veteran more than two decades ago to build a professional-grade product that meets combat standards.
BCM believes the same level of protection should be provided to every American, regardless of whether they're a private citizen or a professional.
BCM is not a sporting arms company.
They're there to make weapons that will function properly when the time comes to use them if your life is, God forbid, in danger.
Each component of a BCM rifle is hand assembled and tested by Americans to a life-saving standard.
BCM feels moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that will not fail the user when it's not just a paper target.
They work with all the leading instructors of marksmanship from top levels of America's special ops forces, from Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance to U.S. Army Special Ops Forces, who can teach the skills necessary to defend yourself.
To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, head on over to bravocompanymfg.com.
You can discover more about their products, special offers, and upcoming news.
Again, that's bravocompanymfg.com.
If you need more convincing, go check them out at YouTube as well.
YouTube.com slash bravocompanyusa.
I've talked to the founders of the company.
These are guys who do not give a damn about what anybody has to say about them.
All they care about is providing the best life-saving product directly to you.
bravocompanymfg.com.
That's bravocompanymfg.com.
Go check them out right now.
You know, this, though, points to something.
I agree with everything you just said about risk of reverse corporations, but we have to add into that that the shift from a manufacturing economy to an information economy is a shift from people who are good at making things like these guys, right, like Bravo Company, to people who specialize in emotion.
And they are naturally leftist.
And the corporate world has turned more to the left as we have shifted more to an information economy.
And this old idea that the Republicans are the friends of corporations is no longer entirely true.
I think there's truth to that.
And I'm not sure about whether it's emotion, but I do think that it has something to do with the idea that a material product on the shelf is what it is, right?
The piece of metal that you are buying on the shelf.
You've got to do a good job.
Right.
In the end, it's going to be judged by the quality of the product that's on the shelf, whereas technology is going to be judged by all of these other vague things that you feel about the company, which is why you see all these corporations now branding the most leftist possible fashion, because they feel like the conservatives—the thing is, they do rely on the goodwill of conservatives, right?
They rely on the facts that conservatives see a commercial that we find— A little offensive.
And we're not going to care enough to boycott their product.
But they've reached out to this whole broad new group of people because that broad group of new people is really interested in exactly that kind of virtue signaling.
You see this with Nike and Colin Kaepernick.
They figure no conservative is actually going to not buy a Nike shoe.
We'll just go buy whatever shoe is best because that's how we're used to purchasing products.
But everybody on the left who's deeply concerned about politics is going to be suckered into spending their hard-earned dollars with a capitalistic company that is using sweatshop labor in China.
Yeah.
Because Colin Kaepernick is kneeling on a poster for them.
There goes Nike as a potential advertiser.
But it is true.
When I said that, you know, the apathetic person in the middle, there's a reason.
The left is smart.
What they are doing is they are paring away the people around the Overton window.
They're gradually closing it.
So they're not going directly for the center of the Overton window.
They're not just saying, okay, no more Shapiro.
Instead, what they're doing is they're saying, well, let's start with, like, Alex Jones.
Because everybody hates Alex Jones because he's a schmuck.
And I'm like, yeah, you're right, he's a schmuck.
But...
You know, you can't throw him out because if you throw him out, then you could throw everybody out.
They say, well, but if you think that he shouldn't be thrown out, that's probably because you agree with him.
And then you should be thrown out alongside him.
I saw this happen a couple of years ago when there was all this talk about should you be able to punch a Nazi?
And the idea was that if you say that Nazis have a First Amendment right to speech, you agree with the Nazi.
Or if you say there's a First Amendment right to use the N-word, that means that you're in favor of using the N-word, which is nonsensical.
It's disgusting.
Right.
The left used to agree with us.
The ACLU defended the Nazis' right to speak.
The ACLU is the best possible witness test for what has happened in the country.
The ACLU recently came out and they said, we are not going to defend the due process rights of Justice Kavanaugh.
We're not going to defend his due process rights because it might offend people.
There's such a thing as too much due process.
You're the ACLU. It's literally in your name.
It's like, just take the C and the L out, right?
Civil Liberties Union.
But this is where it's going, is to scare everybody into silence.
And when Trump came forth, I think this was really his main pitch, was more than anything else.
I think his main pitch was that he was a giant pulsating middle finger to everything, including this stuff.
And people were like, okay, well, if he can say that, then I can say that.
And the problem is that, and this has been the problem for President Trump historically, is that it is so worthwhile to do that.
It is really worthwhile to be able to say F you on topics where we have to stand on our hind legs and do that.
But we do have to ourselves be careful to continue being decent human beings even as we do.
We do have to take responsibility for the fact that we let the culture slide so far that only a boor like Trump would break the rules.
Speak for yourself, old dude.
Yeah.
I actually disagree that only a boar would do it.
I just think only a boar could get away with it.
Meaning that, like, I've been doing it my entire career, right?
You've been doing it, too.
Like, we all know people who have been deeply politically incorrect for their entire career, but they haven't gotten away with it.
The reason that Trump got away with it is because his level of fame was so high that it was impossible to destroy him.
The media created him, and then they couldn't destroy the Frankenstein.
And he also understood the principle of not apologizing, of never looking back, of even when you say the wrong thing.
I'm a tremendously polite person in real life, and it's really hard to do that.
You have to be able to say, I insulted you, I don't care.
And it takes a certain kind of person to do that.
But therein lies the problem.
I agree.
Your first reaction to somebody saying you did something bad, and believe it or not, I try to be a good person.
That's what the funny hat is for in the whole thing.
We try not to tell people.
I know.
It's a dirty little secret.
But when somebody says something you did is wrong, your first reaction as a good person is, Okay, maybe.
Let me really think about that.
You hurt somebody's feelings you don't want to do.
Perhaps you'll even apologize.
Right, exactly.
And it's not terrible to apologize.
So we've got this new feeling is almost too strong in the other direction.
I just feel like the country's swinging wildly side to side.
It was apologize for everything.
And then Trump came along and said apologize for nothing.
And the right answer is apologize for the wrong things.
When you're wrong.
If we all just kind of basically abided by the rules that we learned when we were seven, the country would be that much better.
Like all those Republicans who used to lose, like George Bush and George Bush and Mitt Romney?
This is the thing that bothers me, is that we take...
There's a utility...
To what Trump does, even though much of what he does is wrong.
Right.
That's right.
So many on our side have seen the utility, and they refuse to make the distinction between what's right and wrong.
And so you're seeing bad behavior now from many people, even friends of ours, I won't name them.
You're seeing bad behavior from many people on the right.
Because of this new sort of FU attitude.
I was going to say a minute ago about the gospel that I often tell people that my view of the gospel is that we have basically complete forgiveness in Christ.
And that because of that, that we have freedom from legal moral restrictions in our relationship with God, doesn't mean anything about our relationship with each other or anything, but in our relationship with God, that that's been covered, and that there's now a new way to live, and the new way to live isn't based on regulation, but it's based on sort of relationship.
People always immediately respond to this by saying, so you're saying I can just kill people and cheat on my wife?
And I always say, they think that they're revealing a hole in my theology.
They're revealing a hole in their character.
They're saying, if I had grace from God, the first thing I would do is murder people and cheat on my wife.
It's like the purge.
Yeah, exactly.
And I worry that we're saying that a little bit on the right, too, where it's like, instead of saying that we've been freed from what was wrong with the restrictions of the Obama era, there were so many things that were true that we couldn't say.
We now are embracing the Trump freedom and feel free to say the things that we shouldn't It's such a deep point, and by the way, I have to say, I sort of agree, as the Jew in the room, I sort of agree with the critics because I do think that human nature is to say that if you were given the capacity for running room, that you would do whatever you wanted.
Because people historically have basically done whatever they wanted when given running room.
And so that's why it's not enough to do away with all of the old rules that the left was trying to push on us.
We do have to re-inculcate virtue.
And that's where the other half of Trump is missing.
Trump is great at knocking down rules.
And all of us cheer when the bull in the China shop breaks the China that needs to be broken.
It's not just that he's breaking China that doesn't need to be broken.
It's that we do need a new set of China there.
We need to be able to serve dinner.
But it would help if George W. Bush, decent man, But it would also help if Donald Trump Didn't say that the Soviet Union was right to invade Afghanistan.
No, of course.
It's time to talk to some of our DailyWire.com subscribers who pay the bills around these parts.
It's time to talk to Elisha Krauss.
Even better.
I'm over here in Subscriber Central, which I found out it's really uncomfortable.
And then someone said, no, no, no, it's not a broom closet.
It's Knowles' studio.
Even though you can't fire him, you did give him a really crappy call.
I just want everyone to know that.
That was Ben's doing it.
Ben actually personally designed it.
This question comes from Joel Jay and he wants to know why Michael Knowles and other strong conservatives seem to hate vegetarians and vegans.
Is it possible to truly be conservative and non-meat eating?
Does this not impact how the GOP sees suburban voters?
I don't hate vegetarians and vegans.
I love vegetarians and vegans and I want them to be happy.
And one of the ways to be happy is to eat veal, one of the most delicious meats.
Foie gras is very good.
The problem with veganism, not vegans, vegans are confused and I want them to see the light, is that veganism is morally incoherent.
How many vegans do you know who are pro-life?
Very few.
Maybe they exist, but there are very few.
Most vegans I know.
Very left-wing, very in favor of abortion.
But part of this is the moral incoherence here.
Does anyone really believe that an oyster is more conscious than a carrot in any measurable way?
I don't think so.
Not really.
It's a total inversion of the natural order.
We, biblically speaking, have dominion over the land and the sea.
We are conscious beings.
We use our reason.
We are biologically built to consume meat.
It is good for us.
Vegans always look kind of sickly and weird.
And they're always imposing their will on all of us.
It's a total inversion of the natural order.
And the left, as we always say, gets everything totally wrong.
They turn comedy into tragedy.
They turn everything upside down.
Politically correct means...
Not correct, right?
All of these various things.
This is another example of them getting it wrong.
And if they would stop serving the environment as though the environment were above them, it were some god of theirs, they would learn that we are designed to serve products of the natural environment to each other on daily basis.
I have a theory about veganism and vegetarianism that's going to be the most unpopular thing that I've said all night.
But I want us to get back together in 50 years.
and we'll raise a glass to Drew.
- I'm just not gonna be here. - And talk about whether or not my prediction has borne out.
I know where you're going and I will agree with you.
I think that the next frontier in human morality is toward vegetarianism.
Totally agree with this.
What?
Do you know who else thought that?
Hitler!
I totally agree with this.
I've said this before.
It actually raises an interesting question for me about morality versus righteousness, which is we sometimes conflate the two, and we try to make God a moral being.
But the problem is that morality exists within a societal framework.
But God is a righteous being, and righteousness flows from God.
It's not a human-made construct.
And so there's an interesting question about...
Can morality actually improve across a given civilization, across a given amount of time, while righteousness within that civilization decreases?
And so here's an example of this.
It is the case that in Eden, man did not eat meat.
But it is also the case that upon the expulsion from Eden, God killed the first animals to provide not food.
Nice jackets.
To require fur.
Fur for the lovely ladies.
Over time, however, and I know it's naive to say as we progress we get better.
Because, you know, the 20th century is the most bloody century in human history.
But there are aspects that become better from a sort of moral point of view.
Doing away with polygamy, doing away with child marriage.
The Virgin Mary was probably 14 years old when she conceived Christ, but none of us think that it's a bad thing that 14-year-olds aren't married off to 30-year-old men today.
We think that that's a probably moral improvement.
It doesn't make them immoral to have done it at the time because they didn't live in the framework of our current society.
You know, they needed polygamy to build civilizations in the beginning.
They needed women to get married and have children very young when the life expectancy was very short.
And so you had to create children early on.
There's other things that are maybe less justifiable but still represent shifts in morality.
Slavery.
You know, we had...
Slavery was ubiquitous across almost all cultures on all of the earth.
And then an awakening came in our consciousness.
And now, you know, I say George Washington, one of the greatest men to ever live, oversaw 300 slaves.
If I oversaw just one, you would all agree that...
You're a real jerk.
Because I don't live in that moral construct.
And I do oversee one.
Exactly.
You can't sell him off and get rid of him?
He keeps trying to sell me off.
Who would buy him?
And so there's an interesting question to me.
I think the left is going to turn to vegetarianism and veganism and this sort of really expansive view of animal rights over the next 50 years.
I think that's the next frontier.
But my question is, Is it a moral improvement?
It's obviously the case that without the eating of meat, as a human race, we could not have gotten to where we are today.
But there is a question.
Once you live in a nation so rich, or on an earth so rich...
Or once you have the capacity to make protein...
They're growing stakes without animals now.
So here's where I think the big distinction lies.
So I'm actually, believe it or not, as a big meat eater, I think that in 100 years people are going to look back and think that we're all barbarians.
And I think that, and I could see myself moving toward this, but not on the basis of animal rights.
So here's where I think that there's a big distinction.
I think there's a difference between human duty and animal rights.
Where the animal rights crowd is coming from is that animals are basically the same as human beings.
And this is why whenever I'm asked this question, it's like, well, you care about unborn babies, but you don't care about the slaughter of a cow.
It's like, right, because a baby's a baby, and a cow's a cow, and they aren't the same thing.
But people in the animal rights movement are always assuming the commonalities between animals and human beings, which I completely deny and do not accept.
With that said, the idea that if I have the capacity to receive nutrition, like full nutrition, let's assume, from sources other than the death or suffering of animals, that seems to me not an immoral concept, as long as I maintain that distinction between the worth of a human and the worth of an animal.
I think that where we start to backslide, and this is what's been happening, is people say that humans and animals are the same, therefore don't eat meat.
Humans and animals are not the same, therefore don't eat meat.
But it is possible that you can arise in a future where it is more moral not to eat meat.
But that doesn't mean that people who ate meat in generations past were less moral.
But the part of this that I agree with is I do believe that the mass reduction of meat has caused animals to be actually maltreated.
And they do share the creation with us.
And I think as soon as the last child on earth It's well fed.
I'm going to start to worry about this.
And I think it is worth worrying about.
The other thing is, I do believe that meat is going to be produced without animals.
Right.
And at that point...
Technology will solve everything.
There is a distinction.
There's a distinction to draw.
I think you're right.
I agree we shouldn't be cruel to animals.
I agree with C.S. Lewis.
The reason not to be cruel to animals is not because the animal doesn't have any rights, but it's because it deadens your humanity.
But I do remember a certain ancient people who developed very strict rules for how to slaughter animals, you know, in a very specific way.
I don't see anything wrong with that at all.
I don't see anything.
You don't see anything wrong about it, but those rules were developed in a societal construct where the eating of meat was a requirement for the thriving of the civilization.
I'm looking, I'm asking a moral question about an emerging future where that may not be the case.
And if my theory is right, then it may necessarily be the case that we eventually, in the end times, in whatever the final analysis is, that we might live in the most moral Human society that's ever existed, but the least righteous one.
Because we will have constructed a morality that reflects God, but doesn't contain Him in any way.
This is what's so wrong with the guys like Steven Pinker, who says everything is going great, and everything is going great, things are getting better, but that you can live in a happy, completely well-developed society that is morally atrocious.
When you're aborting 50 million babies a day, and everybody's happier, that's not a good thing.
That's not a positive thing.
Elisha!
Throw us another.
This one is for Andrew, and I love it when we do the conversation, and people always seem to ask Andrew detailed relationship questions.
So Locke wants to know, do you ever hear back from those people that you end up giving the relationship advice to?
I do, in fact, and it's been incredibly humbling to say that people...
Good for you that something humbled you.
I know, it's amazing.
It hasn't had the effect of humbling me, but it is telling me to be humbling.
Exactly, it was happening to somebody else.
But yes, apparently this advice has been very useful.
In a way, it's not as shocking as all that.
I have been in a 40-year romance with the same woman we have had one argument in 42 years.
Seriously, one fight.
We haven't had one disagreement.
We disagree all the time.
But I think that I do understand what it is that people do that keeps them from being happy.
And some of the letters I get in the mailbag...
It's so clear what they're doing that even they must know.
They just need somebody to say it.
I said, I think it was at UCLA, a kid came up to me and he said, you know, you told me to man up and no one had ever said that to me before.
Well, then the bar is very low, you know, because nobody's saying to these kids, be a man.
This is so true.
Be a man.
I was having this conversation with Jordan Peterson, who of course is doing this for a lot of young men, particularly.
And we were looking at each other and going like, Jordan's main message, clean up your room, is something that every father should say to every son.
And he's filling up stadiums of 2,000 people to hear him say, clean up your room.
That's a sad fact.
Half of my shtick is doing exactly the same thing that you're doing, which is, man up, take control of your own life.
It's a free country.
All you're guaranteed is adventure.
Go make something of yourself and make a series of responsible decisions that end in a good result.
And all of this is so revolutionary in a society where we expect everybody to clean up after each other, that it's actually drawing massive crowds, which is a hopeful thing, but also kind of a sad thing, right?
I mean, stuff that was taken for granted 40 years ago is now revelatory.
On a personal note, I have to say that I sometimes, having found God late in life, and having been such an infusion of joy into my life, I sometimes have said to God, why...
Why did it have to take 50 years?
Because it's like crossing the desert.
You could have just walked straight into Jordan and it would have taken 10 minutes.
And I really think the reason is I've explored every stupid idea before getting the right answer.
And that's very helpful when you're talking to people who are exploring those ideas.
Alicia.
Alright, Chelsea says, Hey crew, I have some friends who are joining the Democratic Socialists of America and seem militant about the philosophy.
Do you have any ideas on how to convince them of the errors of their ways?
I do, and I don't think it has anything to do with logical arguments against socialism.
This is an unpopular point of view.
There are myriad of logical arguments, historical, philosophical arguments against socialism.
I don't think that's actually the appeal.
I think the appeal for these kids is on a much more base level.
I think it has to do with intersectionality.
I think it has to do with skin color.
I think it has to do with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being Jenny from the block in the Bronx, even though she grew up in northern Westchester.
I think that's really where it comes in.
And you have to make Emotionally compelling narratives.
We talk about this all the time out here in Hollywood.
You have to tell emotionally compelling narratives about the horrors and the ravages of socialism and communism and about the wonders of free markets and capitalism.
And I think if you talk about the statistics, We're good to go.
Lost his limb because of communism.
He had to crawl across a river, ducking guards and bullets to make it to freedom and to show the joy on his face, lifting up that walker that he's walking with.
And you compare that to the ravages that are still in that country.
That is much more compelling.
And it allows people, especially young people who have been denied moral arguments their whole lives, to really cling to something.
I think that's going to stick a lot better than statistics.
I agree, and I also think the thing that conservatives do all the time is they talk about the fact that socialism doesn't work.
And while that's true, it's also just wrong.
Even if it worked, it is wrong for you to go out and work hard to make money.
And for me, because I got elected to something, to take that money away and say, I know better how to spend it.
The DSA pitch basically is you're a better person because you're a socialist.
And that is the chief obstacle you have to overcome when you're arguing with folks is you have to make them understand they're not a better person for being a socialist.
It actually makes you a worse person because you are now espousing a philosophy that says that you deserve my stuff because you're breathing.
And that's not a thing.
You're a thief.
Alicia.
All right.
All grads, I hope I'm saying that right.
Maybe it's just a username.
So sorry if I'm pronouncing it wrong.
He wants to know, should Trump have a contest for meme of the week and tweet the winner every Wednesday night?
We won!
100% he should, right?
Well, you know, before we go any further, it was a big name for Michael.
Next meme.
I can't do the impression.
Next meme.
Before we go any further, I do have to...
This is the only time I'm ever going to do this.
I need to throw this to Michael because we have to get his Alexander Ocasio-Cortez retelling.
We've gone through this entire episode without the...
This is his big moment, guys.
The only use he has had in several years.
This better not just be live.
We better have this tape of Ben complimenting me here.
This was a Christmas gift.
This happened on...
Also, please explain why it matters.
Why this is important.
Because you're getting a lot of flack.
People saying, like, why are you so down on AOC? Explain the whole thing.
Right.
So AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she sent out this tweet.
Really, it was a social media intern who sent out a very stupid tweet.
But it was this tweet of her congressional plaque, and it said, don't be fooled by the plaques that I got.
I'm still, I'm still Alex from the Bronx.
This is her appeal.
She's this scrappy girl.
She says it.
Trump's going to deal with this girl from the Bronx.
I'm not from Brooklyn.
She's not from the Bronx.
We grew up in neighboring towns in affluent northern Westchester, one of the richest counties in the country.
She grew up in the much richer, much less diverse town next door, Yorktown Heights.
I grew up in Bedford Hills.
I don't pretend to be from the...
I went to the Bronx once a week as a kid to go grocery shopping, see people.
Maybe she went once a week.
When she got called out on this during her campaign, she then changed her tune on her campaign bio.
She said, oh, my life was defined by commuting.
You can't commute to a public school.
She lived there her whole life.
Her father was an architect.
She then said, well, I grew up in two worlds.
She didn't grow up in two worlds.
So I was just tweeting this out there.
I said, the average household wealth in the Bronx is $400,000.
The average household wealth where you grew up is three times that.
The median income was this.
The median income was that.
People were getting so upset by this.
It is a fraud.
It is a fraud that she is perpetrating.
And this is the Liz Warren moment for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The way that you know, by the way, that this really hurts her, that this really matters to her, is I'm sitting on my Christmas vacation.
I'm sitting there swilling Chablis...
Having a grand old time.
A few martinis in.
And she is tweeting about this for a day.
Because she knows this is a big weakness for her.
It is the central fraud.
And her appeal, which I think is emotional and intersectional and identity politics, is...
Total fiction.
She went to a place with great public schools.
It was totally affluent.
She got to go to a private college.
She's politically savvy.
She won that seat.
But this claim that she's this scrappy upstart up by her bootstraps, this is why we need socialism, is a total farce.
We should tweet this at her every single day.
We should constantly remind her of this.
Awesome.
And the reason the people I think were asking was because...
At least I seriously got asked this by a member of the media today.
Well, is the right doing the right thing by pointing this out?
Because why aren't they just pointing out the fact that she's shallow and doesn't know anything?
Which is obviously true.
She doesn't know any of the things.
So why are they focusing on her background?
And what I said is because she uses her lack of knowledge.
She shields her lack of knowledge with reference to her story.
That's right.
Basically, every time she's asked, how are you going to pay for stuff?
She says, I'm just a girl from the Bronx.
And we'll figure it out because I'm scrappy.
And it's like, well...
You're going to need to do better than that, right?
You're going to actually need to actually give me some logic behind your ideas.
And if you're going to say that your formative experiences are what caused you to believe these things, then the formative experiences better match up with the things that you believe in.
She is a genuinely dangerous ignoramus.
I mean, I have to say, first of all, the fact that she's pretty, I said this on the show today, that the combination of moral emptiness and a hot body is a bad, dangerous combination.
I know this from personal experience.
True, you're not that hot.
It can lead you down some pretty bad places.
And I think that she has that thing that exemplifies her generation.
She thinks if she speaks with passion and she moves her hands and she looks at you, that changes the words coming out of her mouth into something true.
And it doesn't.
The things that she says aren't true and they're uninformed to the absolute bottom line.
So let's talk to another subscriber.
One thing we haven't talked enough about on today's show is how people can become subscribers.
And if you go to dailywire.com and become a subscriber for $100 a year, not only do you get to ask maybe, let's be honest, we're going to get to maybe six questions.
But you get to see the archives of all the shows, the full video versions of all the shows, and starting next week, you'll get to see the two-hour live video of the new Ben Shapiro show, National Syndicated Radio Show, which is going to launch in like 127 markets or something.
That should be great.
Looking forward to it.
Got nothing else.
Yeah, he is looking forward to it.
I've got to save my voice, man.
Alicia.
All right, Dana says that this question is for Ben.
She wants to know why you called Jeremy Jeremy.
Jeremy.
Yeah.
It's never really occurred to me.
I mean, I didn't realize I started speaking with your southern drawl, I guess.
It was the cowboy hat that did it.
Here's the problem with being named Jeremy Daniel Boring.
Daniel, if you haven't seen it written down, is spelled in my instance D-A-N-I-A-L instead of I-E-L. I did not know that.
It's a Persian spelling.
So, Jeremy...
Is just a terrible name.
I'm from a town of very, very few people.
In my graduating high school class, there were four Jeremys.
Because in 1979, it was suddenly popular to name your kid Jeremy.
So I got named.
My first name possesses no hard consonants.
First of all, if you're going to have sons, your options are biblical characters and kings of England.
That's it.
This is correct.
Those are the only options available.
With hard consonants.
You have to have hard consonants.
My name is Jeremy, which is pronounced by almost everyone, including Ben Shapiro, Jeremy, which basically translates attitudinally to punch me in the face.
There will never be a President Jeremy...
So my parents may be recognizing the mistake.
As soon as they wrote it down, probably they felt shame and kind of didn't like me.
But they had already started writing, so what do you do?
So they said, well, give them a better middle name, Daniel.
It's a biblical name, the Justice of God, Daniel, right?
And D-A-N-I-E-L-L being the God of the Bible.
But that's not what they did.
They wrote it D-A-N-I-A-L. Well, it turns out there is a God who is not the God L. And that God is Allah, the God A-L. So my name now is the Justice of Allah, which they followed up with my last name, Boring.
So, my actual Christian name, which is proof that I will never be President of the United States, is Punch Me In The Face, the Justice of Allah Dole Guy.
And that's the way we think of you.
And we let parents name children in this country without having to register in with the state for a second.
Go Canada.
Alicia, what's next?
Alright, this question comes from Joshua, and he wants to know, what is one fundamental political topic that you all disagree on?
Huh.
That's a good question.
Well, there was the one we had earlier.
Yeah, although we sort of agreed more than we...
It was kind of vague.
What is...
Do we all disagree?
I mean, it's hard to think of...
It's a fairly central one, though, the one that we were talking about earlier.
I agree.
It's somewhat nuanced, and I want to keep it short because we have a few more things we have to get to today.
But there is a central question about the role of government in shaping economy...
Connected to the role of economy in shaping society.
It's too nuanced.
Do you want me to introduce kind of where this came from?
Please.
Where this sort of came from is that Tucker Carlson did a very interesting monologue last night in which he essentially suggested that the economy of the United States built on capitalism.
Capitalism was built on the idea of providing the best good at the best possible price, but that did not actually fulfill the needs of human beings.
The needs of human beings for jobs and for meaning.
And so we ought to reconstruct the economy in such a way that it helps provide for families and help provide jobs.
This is sort of the point that both Henry Olson has made and Orrin Cass has made, that there are shortcomings to capitalism that can be cured by sort of paring around the edges of capitalism to ensure that people have jobs that give them meaning in their lives, and these jobs then provide the foundation for families.
And I was very critical of this.
You can watch my interview with Tucker, in which we actually get into this a lot.
And my perspective was that capitalism is not what had undermined the family.
That basically what had undermined the family was a lack of religion, and that that lack of religion has destroyed the fundamental basis for capitalism, which is why we are now sliding away from capitalism.
That you actually need a virtuous society in order to maintain that sort of freedom.
And I think where the debate came in is that Drew believes that the economy...
My view is that virtue and economics are rarely linked.
I don't think that virtue and economics really have much to do with one another.
I think that's sort of a Marxist view, that if you change the economy of the situation, then you necessarily change family structure.
Drew, what's your view?
I think the thing that we were disagreeing about is I really seriously believe that conservatives find themselves in a bind.
And the bind is this.
We believe, I believe, that John Adams was right when he said we've written a constitution for a religious people.
And I think we are increasingly an irreligious people.
And even the 70% of people who identify as Christians are not Christians as John Adams would have understood it.
And a lot of the people who say that they have no religion are not atheists, but they have gone off into what Duthot would call bad religion.
To me, who are you selling the Constitution to if you're selling it to people who don't believe in God?
Because not only does religion shape the moral view of people, it also shapes their view of what a human being is.
In order to believe that you are a human being with essential dignity who has God-given rights to freedom, you have to believe in a God who gives you those rights to freedom.
So, in other words, what I think is when you say, To a 12-year-old, a poor 12-year-old whose mother is a crack addict hooker and whose father hasn't been around since he was born, you say, pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
You're talking a language that that kid does not understand.
And when you leave that kid to fend for himself and he joins a gang because that's the only family he'll ever get, and then you say, well, that's just bad behavior, I think the conservatives are...
Exercising a fundamental misunderstanding of the way people are.
The man who pulls himself up by his bootstraps in that situation is an anomaly.
He's an exception.
He's an exceptional human being.
The kid who is lost in that situation needs help.
Now where you and I agree that I want that help to come...
As close to the community as it possibly can.
And this we agree on.
I want it to come, if it has to come from the state, I'll go with that.
But I want it to come from the church instead.
And that's why I support a lot of these guys who go in, the monks who go into Newark and raise kids, essentially.
That's where a lot of the answers come from.
But in the meantime, you cannot leave people to die.
You cannot leave a 12-year-old in that situation to fend for himself because he won't.
And surely you would say that the government, there was a relationship between economics and family in so much as government intervention in the economy during, say, the 1960s led to immediately a breakdown of the family.
Right.
So I guess the contention I would make is that government has the capacity to destroy the family.
It doesn't have the capacity to recreate the family.
Sure.
Sure.
And I think that the mistake that I'm seeing from Tucker and from Oren Cass and some other folks is that it'll reinstill virtue in the people to change the economy.
And I don't think that's right.
I think the virtue has to predate the economy.
That's where we agree.
Right, that's where we agree.
But I think where we disagree is when you say things like, in the meantime, you can't just let people starve.
I'm not saying nobody wants kids who are in this situation to starve.
But where we disagree, I know Jeremy, this is where you disagree, is the idea that the government providing for that doesn't have more cost than benefits, meaning that when the government comes in and says, okay, now we're going to provide a social safety net, you're creating a perverse incentive structure that encourages more creation of 12-year-olds who are going to be dependent on the government, and the proof of that is the last 50 years of governmental largesse.
I think there was a wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal, I believe it was by Phil Graham, I don't want to pin him with it if it wasn't, but I believe that's who wrote it, where he said, you know, a lot of these redistribution programs have seriously helped people economically, and at the same time, they've seriously created a culture of dependency.
And that's the problem that we face.
And I think the way into this is to attack the culture of dependency through theology and through philosophy in order to start to pare back This system that has actually had real benefits.
I think there's two points of disagreement for me.
One of them I think Ben and I share.
I disagree with that article.
I disagree with the assertion that these programs have fundamentally increased people's economic prosperity.
I don't think they have.
I don't think that's right.
I think you're wrong.
The poverty rate in the country is dropping faster before the implementation of welfare than it was after the implementation of welfare.
But the fact is that the people who live in poverty now live at the level of middle class people in the 80s.
And that's because of capitalism that has nothing to do with redistribution.
No, that's not true.
It does have to do with redistribution.
Then why were living standards better in 1950 than in 1900?
There wasn't socialism redistributionism between 1900 and 1950, and economic standards rose dramatically.
Yes, but they rose between 1900 and 1920.
I can pick any period of American history in which capitalism reigned, and living standards always get better.
Capitalism raises people up.
Capitalism is magic.
It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
There's no question about it.
But in order to have people who are free, they need to have a conception of themselves as people who deserve to be free.
And I think we've lost that conception.
If you don't start there, you're lost.
I think there is one other point of disagreement, though, and I won't put these words in Ben's mouth because it may be that this is my unique disagreement.
Your son actually helped me understand this.
You...
Think of politics in very practical terms.
I do.
And I think about politics in very ideal terms.
Right.
That's absolutely true.
I think that you cannot achieve your practical ends if we forsake the ideal arguments.
I'm not talking about idealism in the sense of that we disconnect our beliefs from the consequences of our beliefs.
But I'm talking about it in an aspirational sense.
What bothers me about Trump, for example, is that Trump does not even speak the language of aspiration toward the ideals on which this country was founded.
He has accomplished some practical successes for us, but in winning the battles, I worry that we're losing the war because we're not even fighting the war, we're forsaking the war.
And I think part of our point of disagreement when we get into these conversations and many other things that we disagree about is because I'm not willing to give up My aspirational views of what we should stand for.
It's why I talk more about theology and you talk more about people's needs, even in religious conversations.
You talk about the struggling man and I talk about the glory of God.
Because you're the God King.
That's a slight overstatement, but it's just a way of thinking about our day.
You know, though, what strikes me about this is I don't think any two of us have the identical view on basically any issue whatsoever.
And yet, on major political issues, we almost agree entirely.
I mean, on almost every issue.
Why is that?
It's because there is a sort of coherence to conservative thought.
But unlike the left, the conservative, the left is ideologically homogenous in progressivism.
But the right has so many variations of it.
There's neoconservatism, traditionalism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, on and on and on.
And so I think various combinations and mixtures of these influences is why none of us have exactly the same opinion.
I think it's also because the hot button issues have been so skewed outside of the rational that I really believe that rational people who actually think about a lot of these hot button issues with any sense of values are going to come to agreement on a lot of them.
Because if I say abortion...
The left's position is on demand.
We're all going to agree that's asinine.
And this is true if I say redefining male and female, and the left's view is that they don't exist.
What else are rational people supposed to say?
But I'll bet you that I'll give an issue where I think that we probably do have pretty significant disagreement.
I know we do, actually.
It's on climate change.
So on climate change, I actually see no serious reason to doubt the idea that the world is getting warmer over the course of time and that human activity is responsible for at least a majority of that warming.
I don't know about a majority, but some.
I think at least 50%.
I don't know that it's 95%, but at least 50%.
But my disagreement with the left comes when they start saying, and the solution to that is to tax all of the developed countries so that all of the developing countries can continue to pollute the earth to the extent that the climate continues to warm.
I know Jeremy is not a climate change...
Fan, right?
Yeah, I'm a skeptic.
You're a real skeptic.
And I'm not sure where you guys are on this issue.
I'm a modern skeptic.
I mean, I do believe that there are always two questions with the left.
The first thing is the issue, and the second thing is their solution, which is the government should take over everything.
And I think that no socialist, no government solution is going to work here.
It's going to be a technological solution.
I'm not against some investment in that kind of solution, but basically I think some guy in a garage will invent a battery that can contain, you know, wind creatives.
And there's even another level of skepticism, which is skepticism not of the warming or cooling or not of the, even the anthropogenic part, the man-made part, but of the catastrophic part.
Right, that's correct also.
I am skeptical of that.
Because, you know, even the worst prediction is that it will take 10% off an economy that's going to grow something like 300-400% in the time it will take to take 10% off.
We can afford that.
That's a good deal.
It's a great deal.
This is the point that was made by William Nordhaus, who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
That is the worst prediction of it.
And most people think it's going to be more like 5%.
So, you know, I'm just very skeptical of the sky as well.
If we can't accept that over the course of the next century.
Yeah.
Human ingenuity has been pretty good about fixing problems.
Exactly.
So if it costs us 5% of our economy in a time when the economy grows by 400%, and in the meantime some clown invents a battery that's going to solve the problem, Yeah, you know, I just thought that worked.
Yep.
Alicia, I want to take one more question and then there's two last things that we have to talk about before we can let people go for tonight.
Mostly because I made promises, you guys.
And like Robert Frost's poem, which is now in the public domain, promises to keep and miles to go.
You know what that's about?
It's about suicide.
Alicia, share one last question with us from our Daily Wire subscribers.
Do we have a Daily Wire suicide hotline?
So when I tell you that I'm making Brussels sprouts for dinner tonight, you don't try to burn your face off?
With Brussels sprouts.
Alright, I guess this question is for Ben and Michael.
Ben Shapiro quotes on the Daily Wire subscriber page wants to know, do Ben and Knowles have a bet on whose book will sell the most copies?
And does that bet involve Knowles' maybe unemployment?
So, we do not have a bet.
I would not make that bet.
The last bet I made with Knowles I lost was about the 2016 election.
He has never let me forget it.
I'll tell you what.
I think this book, I read your book.
I'm not just saying this because you could defenestrate me right now and throw me out the window.
It's very good.
It's really good.
I think it's going to sell a zillion copies.
It's very important.
It's better than all the other popular books that have come out recently.
I really mean that.
Thank you.
That's why I don't know that it's going to sell 250,000 copies, right?
But I would still be willing to bet that my book sold more or will sell more if you give me odds again.
Alicia, thank you.
Thank you to our DailyWire.com subscribers for all you do to keep us employed.
The last two things I want to talk about tonight, one of them is pretty important and one of them is really just a hat tip to a loyal fan.
It's New Year's.
Everyone is making resolutions.
They always do.
I think people like us tend to kind of roll our eyes at New Year's resolutions on account of how most people don't keep them for very long.
But there's something aspirational and beautiful about a New Year's resolution.
You know, a new year, which is, after all, an arbitrary day on a calendar.
Nevertheless, it gives people a sense of reset.
It gives them the opportunity to reassess, to start anew.
And when people do reassess and start anew, there are some very predictable places in their lives where they try to make improvements.
And so I thought it'd be a fun exercise if each of us talked about one of the sort of common New Year's resolutions and shared not a gimmick, not a scheme.
We're not selling anything.
We're not trying to set people up for false hope.
But actually just share an actual piece of insight.
Or piece of wisdom that you've accumulated in your life that might help a person make substantive change in those areas and not just fleeting change in those areas?
So for me, my New Year's resolution, believe it or not, has been to disconnect a lot more from social media.
It's driving my family up a wall.
It's driving me up a wall.
When I went on vacation, it actually taught me a lesson.
It was the first vacation I'd had in a couple of years where I actually did a pretty good job of disconnecting from social media, where I wasn't flipping through my phone or trying to keep up with the news.
Part of that was because in the past, I've taken vacation during actual work times.
This time, it was between Christmas and New Year's, so everybody was on vacation, so nothing was happening except the president telling seven-year-olds that Santa doesn't exist.
Which I did text to each and every one of you with the notation, Merry Christmas.
But it's...
It is true that social media makes you miserable.
I want people to be on social media to the extent they keep up with the news and they're informed.
But the need for information, the feeling that your brain craves information, it really isn't craving the information, it's craving the feeling of scrolling your thumb.
And you can get so much more done.
By just leaving your phone in the other room.
Like really, this is my new thing.
The way that I'm dealing with it is I have a prophylactic rule.
Just like with Judaism, the prophylactic rule about not working is that you don't use electricity and you don't drive, you don't do all these things.
The prophylactic rule for me is that when I get home at night, I take my phone, I plug it in in my room.
It is away from me.
It is not on my person.
And that way, I'm not checking my phone all the time.
And then I have a book at my disposal.
And if nothing's happening, then I read the book.
Because if all the hours that I spent on social media I spent reading...
I mean, I'm smart now.
We'd all be a lot more.
I mean, come on.
So, there's my New Year's resolution.
That's a very good one.
I have a New Year's resolution, which is to write a book with words.
This is a very discreet New Year's resolution, and it's sort of funny.
Good for you, dude.
I know, I know.
You know, I really felt...
I mean, I'm going to warn you that it's really counterproductive.
I'm not going to make any money.
I know.
The reason I bring this one up in particular is because it is not grand.
It is not open-ended.
You've written a lot more books than I haven't written.
But it is a contained activity.
And I think a lot of times New Year's resolutions go wrong because they're so open-ended.
I'm going to get healthier.
I'm going to read more.
I'm going to go to the gym.
I don't know.
I'm going to eat better.
And it's really easy to lose that.
But with a really discreet activity and project, You can fail.
You can fail to do it or you can do it, and the clock is ticking, the movement watch is ticking, and it's never going to go backwards.
And I think New Year's resolutions, I've just found, have always worked better when there's a time limit on them.
And Dennis Prager says that the written word is the mirror of the mind, right?
That if you want to become associated with your own thoughts, organize them and write them down.
Which is a good reason for you not to write a book.
Yeah, that's right.
This book is going to say they're making the frogs here, they're making the frogs here, they're making the frogs here.
Well, first of all, I want to say that I think New Year's resolutions get a bad rap.
I think the studies show that they actually do help people.
That, you know, plenty of them go by the boards, but plenty of them also stick.
I have a very obscure New Year's resolution, but it is a real one, because I don't usually make them at all.
To live.
What's that?
To live.
That's always my resolution.
Every day, that's my resolution.
But last year, I reread a lot of Aristotle, who I was a big fan of, but I reread him as a Christian.
And one of the things that Aristotle teaches is that virtue is a habit, and habits are formed by repeated exercise of those habits.
If you tried out my religion, we've been big in this for a really long time.
I think that I want to pay a lot more attention to what one philosopher calls the liturgies in my life.
The things that you go out and do that have inherent in them an idea of what a better life is.
If you go out trying to make money, for instance, then your idea is that that will give you a better life.
And I'm all for making money and all this.
It's not about that.
But I want to make sure that there is enough A habit in my life that focuses me on the things that I really care about, which are two things, really.
One of them is trying to tell the truth, and the other is trying to tell the truth in a beautiful way.
And I just want to make sure that those are habits that I continue to pay attention to.
It's not so much about doing them.
It's doing them with a conscious, zen-like mind that I'm quite good at.
And I want to make sure I do it more.
That's fantastic.
One of the things that I've thought about over the last couple of years, and it's because I've been a beneficiary of some wisdom that was shared with me, which I'll get to, I want to help people make more money.
And I haven't cracked the code on exactly how I'm going to do it, other than I'm going to use some opportunities, for example, even on this show, to make a point of talking about it, because we don't.
People look in and perhaps they think that three out of four of us are successful in life.
And it breeds a lot of problems in the human heart.
It can breed resentment towards people who you think are being successful.
It can breed a distorted view of the world, and social media contributes to this, where you think people are more successful than they are.
And you think that...
But one thing that I discovered in my life early on and that I've seen with a lot of young people, in particular young religious people, is that while they may espouse a belief in, say, capitalism or incentive-based economics in sort of philosophical terms, in their own lives they have shame about Success and shame about making money and a fear of allowing themselves to prosper.
And I suffered greatly from that for most of my life.
I worked as hard as anyone I knew I would not accept pay for my work.
And two people really spoke into my life at a very similar time about this.
One of them is a friend of mine, Frank Brunner.
And another one is Ben Shapiro, who came into my life around that time and said, why do you do all of these things for free?
And...
The truth is, there was a reason.
I didn't understand it about myself what the reason was.
I came to understand over time that it was a kind of cowardice.
That I took a lot of big risks.
I moved to LA from a small town.
I was going to be an actor, a writer, a producer, and I had opportunities to take capital from people and produce films, take capital from people and found companies, Declaration Entertainment, with our friend Bill Whittle.
Spiral the Arroyo with Jonathan Hay, others.
Or I had the opportunity to step in and help run this organization of conservative Hollywoods, many thousands of people.
And it was always on very financially tenuous footing.
And so I didn't take any money for running that organization.
The funny thing is, if you look back across that same period of time, millions of dollars went through my hands, and I paid out salaries to other people.
So when I was running that organization of that nonprofit of Hollywood conservatives, I was paying staff, but I didn't pay myself.
When I was running, doing the Arroyo, I was making sure that, you know, we didn't have a lot of money, but every person got their check every day.
When we were running Declaration of Entertainment, I made sure that Bill Whittle was making a good living and that Jonathan Hay was making a good living.
Nowhere in there was I rewarding Jeremy.
And when I say not at all, I mean not at all.
And I came to see it's because I had a fear of being kind of found out.
That if I paid myself and the project failed, that I would sort of be revealed as some sort of fraud.
But if I didn't pay myself and the project failed, no one could accuse me of having had bad motives.
No one could accuse me of it having failed on the basis of me having my hand in the cookie jar.
But of course, the opposite was true.
Many of those companies may well have succeeded had I tied my economic future to them.
Had I had skin in the game, then I would have had incentive to have worked even...
And I worked hard.
I don't want you to think that I was phoning it in.
But I wasn't phoning it in as though my economic life depended on it, because my economic life did not depend on it.
And Ben...
I used the very colorful analogy that my problem wasn't lack of urine, it was the direction in which I peed.
When a good wind is blowing, you do well to turn the other way.
And of course that was right, that I had plenty of effort, but I wasn't putting my effort I wasn't letting these values that I espouse of free markets and incentives actually apply to my own life.
That I thought that I was somehow morally above my own ideas of what would work for other people.
And I talk to young Christians in particular, young conservatives, and I find that so many people have similar issues where they think they're too good for their actual...
And you shouldn't be.
Because having not had very much money and having had more money, having more money is better.
Money doesn't make you happy.
Money doesn't solve all of your problems.
But growing up in a small town, growing up middle class, much more blessed than many of the people around me, nevertheless, knew a lot of economic struggle in my life and witnessed far more around me economic struggle.
And economic struggle...
It does wear on the soul of a man.
It sure does.
You have a responsibility to yourself to reward, to make sure that you are getting reward for your work.
You have a responsibility to your family to make sure that you're being rewarded appropriately for your work.
So I want to find ways to help people see past this particular fear, the fear of allowing themselves to succeed.
It manifests in non-economic ways, too.
Of course.
I want people to allow themselves to have the successes in life that they should, that will make their lives better, their family's lives better, their church's life better, their society's life better, and find ways to give practical advice to that, but also sort of this high-level philosophical advice.
So basically, if three of us keep our New Year's resolutions and one of us doesn't, it'll be a better world.
Finally, it is the 127th birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien and our...
And he's old.
He is one old dude.
What's his sequel?
He's still working at the top of his game, though, I gotta say.
Beloved by...
99.99999% of religious people in the West, beloved by 99.99999% of conservative people in the West.
Especially Catholics, by the way.
99.99999% of Catholics, the one exception, Michael Knowles, Michael Knowles, Why you gotta hate?
This is one of these issues where I don't like Tolkien.
I've tried to read all of the books.
When I was a little kid, I tried to read The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings.
I said, okay, I don't like the books, I'll go to the movies.
I walked out of the movie.
I got so bored because they were in the damn woods for like three hours.
And it just kept me out of the woods.
And yet, look, I know.
I'm actually going to admit.
I know that I'm holding a wrong opinion.
Every year I try to convince myself to like Tolkien.
Can't do it.
Ben, level this guy.
You're fired.
This was the moment.
Why Tolkien?
Well, I mean, if you actually read the Lord of the Rings books, he has a very clear vision of good and evil that is, I think, fundamental to understanding of Number one, all fantasy literature, but also an understanding of world building and rule setting that is kind of transformative in literary history.
Mostly the reason that conservatives, I think, are very fond of Tolkien.
And I'll admit, I'm a rube when it comes to Tolkien.
I'm not a Tolkien scholar.
I'm so much of a rube that I like the movies better than I like the books.
I like The Hobbit.
I think that the long passages of poetry in Lord of the Rings are nearly unreadable.
I'm with you.
And I think that the ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the books is significantly worse than the ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the movie.
And I'm not talking about one of the nine endings of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
But the reason is because...
The very idea that there is a West that is worth upholding is embodied in the nature of Tolkien's writing, and in the Lord of the Rings trilogy particularly, the idea that there is something worth fighting for, that there are people who do not believe in these same principles, and that there are real things that divide people.
And this doesn't mean that everybody who disagrees with you is an orc or a monster, but it does mean that to pretend that there aren't people with monstrous ideas in the world who are fundamentally seduced by power itself, is a great misnomer.
Obviously that's the great revelation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is that the real bad guy doesn't exist out there.
The real bad guy exists in here.
That's why the best moment in all of Lord of the Rings is, spoiler alert for people who haven't read the books or seen the movies, Is when the ring actually seduces Frodo.
Because you've actually been waiting.
I remember seeing it in the theater.
And I deliberately held off from reading the books until I could see it in the theaters.
Because I didn't know it was coming.
And I kept myself shut off.
So I didn't know what the ending was going to be.
And you go for three movies.
It's an entirely long journey with these huge battle sequences.
And you think that you are rooting all three movies for Frodo to toss the ring in the fire.
That's what you think.
You're waiting for.
And then Frodo doesn't.
The ring seduces Frodo.
And it's so satisfying as a viewer.
And as a reader.
Because what you realize is that you haven't been waiting for him to toss the ring in the fire.
Because that would have been anticlimactic.
If he just walked in and threw the ring in the fire, then you're waiting for him to be seduced by the ring to remind you that the ring actually is powerful, that the ring actually means something.
And that notion...
That power is seductive, and that you're thinking that you can wield the power, and that if only you had the power, then you'd be able to fix the world.
That if you were given the ring, and you had the ability to be invisible, and sneak around, and do what you want, and control other people, that you'd make a utopia out of it?
No, you wouldn't.
You'd be just like Sauron, right?
Deep down, we are all Sauron.
Unless we give up the ring, Really, not just generally, but we give up the ring to the idea that there is a plan in the universe that is beyond any of us and that we're going to have to let go at a certain point because faith exists in letting go.
Right.
It's interesting that you bring up the orcs because the orcs are like the instruments of evil in The Lord of the Rings, but all of the truly sinister characters aren't orcs at all.
That's right.
They're all people or elves or, you know...
Humanoids.
They're all people.
Right.
And they're people who've been seduced by either the power that they have or the power that they don't.
And one of the things I love about the Lord of the Rings is that I kept waiting to see, because like you, I had not read the books when I first saw the films.
I kept waiting for the reveal of what the power of this ring was other than making you invisible.
And you really never see anything.
So what is the great power of the ring?
It's actually a very subtle idea.
And it's just that you would be hidden from man and God.
It kind of goes back to our previous conversation that you could function in this world wholly apart from judgment, wholly apart from consequence, wholly apart from the perspectives of other people.
That really lies at the heart.
It's such an insight by Tolkien of what lies at the heart of almost all true evil, even the evil within.
It's the belief that we could be apart from evil.
God who sees all, but who then wouldn't see you.
I think one of the things that I find really fascinating is that if you watch Game of Thrones, which is a wonderful TV show which makes no moral sense at its basis, George R. R. Martin is an atheist, and all throughout Game of Thrones, there are religions.
And the religions always turn out to be frauds or fake, but the effect of religion is always there.
People come back from the dead, and you say, where were you?
I was nowhere.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
There's no religion in Tolkien.
There's no religion in Lord of the Rings, because Tolkien understood what Shakespeare understood, which is that the Christian religion, or I'll even say the Judeo-Christian religion, it simply...
It is the world.
It is the way the world is.
And so Tolkien never has to mention God.
He never has to show anybody pray.
It's simply the way the world works is the way the Judeo-Christian vision says it works.
And Shakespeare understood exactly the same thing.
People always say Shakespeare's a secular writer.
If he is, I'll be damned.
Because he's not.
Everything that happens, there is a moral arc, you bend that moral arc, there are consequences.
And Tolkien understood it, and that's what makes that book so powerful.
Even though I agree with you, it's overwritten, it's overimagined, the movie's work on a dramatic level far better.
But even so, you know you are in the midst of a vision of the world that has been handed down to this guy for 2,000 years, and he gets it.
He understands it, and he sees the world in those terms, and that makes it a brilliant book.
But Michael Knowles doesn't get it.
You know, this conversation is reminding me that I love essays about Tolkien.
I love...
I can't get into the elves and all.
I can't get into it.
It's those long conference scenes where they talk for...
I mean, please!
He's a sad, sad man, Michael Knowles.
That's it for The Daily Wire backstage, our first episode of 2019.
We will be back on January 29th.
It was actually announced in real time while we were on the show for President Donald Trump's State of the Union address to the Joint Session of Congress.
We will bring you all of our blistering...
Rage.
And we look forward to seeing you there.
Come visit us in the meantime over at dailywire.com.
Thanks to all of our subscribers and everybody who, you know, made it this far.
